This is a follow up to my last post where I did a quick-and-dirty hack to get around the limitations of ASP.NET’s built-in isMobileDevice property.
At the end of that post, I said I was going to wait and see if Microsoft did a better job next time around before I went to the trouble of improving my solution. Well, it didn’t work out that way. You see, even if I hadn’t disliked leaving a quick-and-dirty fix in place, it turned out that there was another complication that meant I really needed to provide a proper solution.
The app uses Ajax extensively (and explicitly) in the non-mobile version in order to give a better user experience. It also uses Ajax implicitly in the mobile solution, as jQuery mobile automatically converts links and forms into Ajax calls unless you tell it not to do so. What I hadn’t taken into account in my quick-and-dirty approach was that I wasn’t just detecting mobile devices inside the view engine – I also needed to detect them in order to provide partial pages to Ajax calls in the non-mobile Web version.
The app delivers three kinds of content:
Unfortunately, as jQuery mobile also makes Ajax calls, when mobiles were not detected by the built-in isMobileDevice property, I was returning the partial page when I should have been returning the full mobile page.
So back to the drawing board.
And since I was now going to have to do things properly, I decided to support all the major mobile platforms, not just Android.
I created a new static method isMobileDevice() which accepts an argument of type HttpContextBase and checks both the built-in isMobileDevice property and series of string constants. I then call this method from inside the ViewEngine Nuget and also from my controllers when detecting if the call is an Ajax call.
Here is the key method:
And here is one of the calls to the method:
If you want the full code, I’ve placed it online as devicedetector.txt. I hope you find it useful.
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