Change Django Templates Based on User-Agent

Question

I\'ve made a Django site, but I\'ve drank the Koolaid and I want to make an IPhone version. After putting much thought into I\'ve come up with two options:

Answer 1

Rather than changing the template directories dynamically you could modify the request and add a value that lets your view know if the user is on an iphone or not. Then wrap render_to_response (or whatever you are using for creating HttpResponse objects) to grab the iphone version of the template instead of the standard html version if they are using an iphone.

Answer 2

Detect the user agent in middleware, switch the url bindings, profit!

How? Django request objects have a .urlconf attribute, which can be set by middleware.

From django docs:

Django determines the root URLconf module to use. Ordinarily, this is the value of the ROOT_URLCONF setting, but if the incoming HttpRequest object has an attribute called urlconf (set by middleware request processing), its value will be used in place of the ROOT_URLCONF setting.

1. In yourproj/middlware.py, write a class that checks the http_user_agent string:

   import re
   MOBILE_AGENT_RE=re.compile(r".*(iphone|mobile|androidtouch)",re.IGNORECASE)
   class MobileMiddleware(object):
       def process_request(self,request):
           if MOBILE_AGENT_RE.match(request.META['HTTP_USER_AGENT']):
               request.urlconf="yourproj.mobile_urls"
   

2. Don't forget to add this to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES in settings.py:

   MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES= [...
       'yourproj.middleware.MobileMiddleware',
   ...]
   

3. Create a mobile urlconf, yourproj/mobile_urls.py:

   urlpatterns=patterns('',('r'/?$', 'mobile.index'), ...)
   

Answer 3

There is a nice article which explains how to render the same data by different templates http://www.postneo.com/2006/07/26/acknowledging-the-mobile-web-with-django

You still need to automatically redirect the user to mobile site however and this can be done using several methods (your check_mobile trick will work too)

Answer 4

I'm developing djangobile, a django mobile extension: http://code.google.com/p/djangobile/

Answer 5

How about redirecting user to i.xxx.com after parsing his UA in some middleware? I highly doubt that mobile users care how url look like, still they can access your site using main url.

Answer 6

A simple solution is to create a wrapper around django.shortcuts.render. I put mine in a utils library in the root of my application. The wrapper works by automatically rendering templates in either a "mobile" or "desktop" folder.

In utils.shortcuts:

from django.shortcuts import render
from user_agents import parse

def my_render(request, *args, **kwargs):
  """
  An extension of django.shortcuts.render.

  Appends 'mobile/' or 'desktop/' to a given template location
  to render the appropriate template for mobile or desktop

  depends on user_agents python library
  https://github.com/selwin/python-user-agents

  """
  template_location = args[0]
  args_list = list(args)

  ua_string = request.META['HTTP_USER_AGENT']
  user_agent = parse(ua_string)

  if user_agent.is_mobile:
      args_list[0] = 'mobile/' + template_location
      args = tuple(args_list)
      return render(request, *args, **kwargs)
  else:
      args_list[0] = 'desktop/' + template_location
      args = tuple(args_list)
      return render(request, *args, **kwargs)

In view:

from utils.shortcuts import my_render

def home(request):    return my_render(request, 'home.html')