How to do authentication in UIWebView properly?

Question

I would like to support HTTP Basic Authentication in my UIWebView.

At the moment, I am canceling requests in

webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navig

Answer 1

I've just implemented this by setting basic auth credentials using an NSMutableURLRequest for the UIWebView. This also avoids the round trip incurred when implementing sharedCredentialStorage (of course there are tradeoffs involved).

Solution:

    NSString *url = @"http://www.my-url-which-requires-basic-auth.io"
    NSString *authStr = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@:%@", username, password];
    NSData *authData = [authStr dataUsingEncoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
    NSString *authValue = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"Basic %@", [authData base64EncodedString]];
    NSMutableURLRequest *mutableRequest = [[NSMutableURLRequest alloc] initWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:url]];
    [mutableRequest setValue:authValue forHTTPHeaderField:@"Authorization"];
    NSURLRequest *request = [mutableRequest copy];
    NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest basicAuthHTTPURLRequestForUrl:url];
    [self.webView loadRequest:request];

You can grab the NSData+Base64 category which implements the base64EncodedString for NSData from Matt Gallagher's page (it was at the bottom of the blog post when I downloaded it)