Detect mobile browser (not just iPhone) in python view

Question

I have a web application written in Django that has one specific page I’d like to implement a mobile version of the template (and slightly different logic) for. I’d like to be able to implement it ala this sudo code:

def(myView)

  do some stuff

  if user-is-on-a-mobile-device:
     do some stuff
     return (my mobile template)

  else:
     do some stuff
     return (my normal template)

I don’t have a huge amount of time and I’m pretty early on in my coding learning curve 🙂 – I found what looks to be a very powerful pluggable app called bloom for getting mobile device capablities – http://code.google.com/p/django-bloom/wiki/BloomDevice
However it seems to make a request via JSON to get lots of device specs I don’t need, which seems a bit inefficient to me.

Does anyone have a suggest simpler method? My detection doesn’t need to be 100%, just iPhone, iPod, android, and mainstream devices…

Does the http_user_agent string have some kind of mobile flag I can check for?

Asked By: Tristan Brotherton

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Source

Answer 1

Update:

I just found: http://code.google.com/p/minidetector/

Which seems to do exactly what I want, I’m going to test now. Feel free to tell me i’m wrong!

Answered By: Tristan Brotherton

Answer 2

best practice: use minidetector to add the extra info to the request, then use django’s built in request context to pass it to your templates like so.

from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.template import RequestContext

def my_view_on_mobile_and_desktop(request)
    .....
    render_to_response('regular_template.html', 
                       {'my vars to template':vars}, 
                       context_instance=RequestContext(request))

then in your template you are able to introduce stuff like:

<html>
  <head>
  {% block head %}
    <title>blah</title>
  {% if request.mobile %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ MEDIA_URL }}/styles/base-mobile.css">
  {% else %}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ MEDIA_URL }}/styles/base-desktop.css">
  {% endif %}
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="navigation">
      {% include "_navigation.html" %}
    </div>
    {% if not request.mobile %}
    <div id="sidebar">
      <p> sidebar content not fit for mobile </p>
    </div>
    {% endif %>
    <div id="content">
      <article>
        {% if not request.mobile %}
        <aside>
          <p> aside content </p>
        </aside>
        {% endif %}
        <p> article content </p>
      </aricle>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

Answered By: Thomas

Answer 3

go for the fork of minidetecor called django-mobi, it includes documentation on how to use it.

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/django-mobi

Answered By: gterzian

Detect mobile browser (not just iPhone) in python view

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