Ability to change baseurl

Description

Hey guys,

This is related to https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/35077 and I’m having a similar problem. and yes, this is a blocker for many use cases many people posted.

I’m suggesting an alternative solution: ability to change the base URL and let users choose to traffic fall through when base URL interception is not hit.

Public API Changes

Need to expose and give the ability to change outside of framework somehow:

https://github.com/dotnet/maui/blob/d0e903735c141cc5ce1f6a07a2265cfb0f8da3c3/src/BlazorWebView/src/Maui/BlazorWebView.cs#L11-L13

https://github.com/dotnet/maui/blob/ff3e934de281ef241f84f85fa6c2825b390d732e/src/BlazorWebView/src/SharedSource/WebView2WebViewManager.cs#L50-L60

on a side note: this won’t make requests substantially faster because there’s will be no DNS resolution as long as we intercept. and even if they do resolution will be cached so this will be premature optimization, don’t they?

Intended Use-Case

So similar to this issue (https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/35077)

example baseurl: contoso.com

• case 1

1. app start
2. app shows the initial page
3. app trying to send ajax POST to contoso.com/some-api (not working, we need a server or fall through to browser request instead of injection)
4. app continues to run

• case 2

1. app start
2. app shows the initial page
3. user input, app trying to redirect to a dynamic page with the same domain which only available via the server
4. server redirects the user back to the original page

This is important because users shouldn’t alter their entire architecture because MAUI is not supporting it.

[Bohdandn]

One more use case: Since 0.0.0.0 is not considered as secure context by some old web views you get limited access to browser api via JS. Cordova allows changing is via hostname property in config.xml.

Example: iOS 14.5

if app origin: app://0.0.0.0/
windows.isSecureContext == false
navigator.mediaDevices == null

if app origin: app://localhost/
windows.isSecureContext == true
navigator.mediaDevices - has value, media devices accessible

It works on iOS 16.3 but we need to be backward compatible, iOS 14.X is still 6-14% of iOS market. So I’d make it configurable and default to 0.0.0.0. https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=220184

You can use WebRTC native libraries to get media devices but it doesn’t work on iOS because of bindings issue + it’s not fully hybrid approach (we have blazor wasm app as well). So @christallire the only workaround so far is:

var handlerType = typeof(BlazorWebViewHandler);
var field = handlerType.GetField("AppOriginUri", BindingFlags.Static | BindingFlags.NonPublic) ?? throw new Exception("AppOriginUri field not found");
field.SetValue(null, new Uri("app://localhost/"));

[christallire]

@Bohdandn thanks for the workaround. I was about to try WebRTC too! it would save a ton of time.

One funny thing is that it renders clarity (from Microsoft) unusable too.