2010

Simple Coldfusion script to detect if a user is on a Mobile platform

Posted By : Shaun McCran
Related Categories: Coldfusion, Android, Mobile

After all the 'mobile talk' at the recent Scotch on the Rocks conference my interest was piqued into looking at mobile versions of sites, and how we as developers can try and seamlessly integrate mobile platforms into our web applications.

The article deals with the first step of that, which is detecting if your user is hitting your site on a mobile platform.

There is a full example of this here: http://www.mccran.co.uk/examples/detect/, hitting this URL with an iPhone or Android device will serve up a different response.

It hadn't struck me before Serge Jespers Scotch on the Rocks talk that you could quite easily pick up the users browser version in the CGI scope using Coldfusion. This value pretty much always contains the Operating System name as well.

As a test I created a script that would email me the correct CGI value, just so I could catalogue the responses from the different devices.

Android request:

view plain print about

1Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.1-update1; en-gb; HTC Desire 1.15.161.4 Build/ERE27) AppleWebKit/530.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/530.17

Iphone request:

view plain print about

1Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7E18 Safari/528.16

IE 8 request:

view plain print about

1Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Firefox request:

view plain print about

1Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.9.1.9) Gecko/20100315 Firefox/3.5.9 ( .NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Next it's a simple case of finding a distinct value in the cgi.http_user_agent string, and redirecting. In this way you could tailor the mobile experience to different markets.

view plain print about

1<cfif findNoCase('Android', cgi.http_user_agent,1)>
2    
3    <cflocation url="android/">
4<cfelseif findNoCase('iPhone', cgi.http_user_agent,1)>
5    
6    <cflocation url="iphone/">
7</cfif>

There is a full example of this here: http://www.mccran.co.uk/examples/detect/, hitting this URL with an iPhone or Android device will serve up a different response.

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I know it might not be considered "mobile", but I figured I throw the iPad user agent up here as well (I just copied it from another site):

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B334b Safari/531.21.10

# Posted By Ben Nadel | 10/06/2010 19:22

Hi Ben,
Good call on the iPad User Agent, I think your right, in that it will become a common mobile browsing platform, and I guess it has its own screen dimensions and functionality, so whatever App you are writing could be tailored to it.

(Glad you copied and pasted the code, thought for a second you'd durned to the 'dark side' and bought one!)

# Posted By Shaun McCran | 11/06/2010 13:07

@Shaun,

No problem. Also, I am not sure why, but someone was telling me at the CFUG that Google Voice thinks the iPad is the iPhone and keeps asking for his phone number. Very odd! Maybe Google sees "WebKit" as the "mobile" browser.

# Posted By Ben Nadel | 11/06/2010 13:47

What about blackberry - I think it is:
Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9800; en) AppleWebKit/534.1+ (KHTML, Like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.141 Mobile Safari/534.1+

I do not have a blackberry so I cannot test this. Anybody?

# Posted By John Glynn | 15/02/2011 16:21

Hi @John,

BlackBerry is certainly worth looking into, especially with the market share it has. I want to spend a bit more time with this and detect some of the new tablet devices as well.

I'll try the BlackBerry simulator, hopefully it will spoof the device type: http://us.blackberry.com/developers/resources/simu...

# Posted By Shaun McCran | 15/02/2011 16:55

By the way, your script is working terrifically! I develop all flash sites (I don't want to hear it, the sites come with an extreme content management system that I could not develop in any other language, and the google analytics reporting control is wonderful ...). Anyway, for iPads and other mobile devices, many of my sites automatically generate a coldfusion version (www.alwaysposh.com). Your script for detecting the user's browsing situation has been the most accurate I have tried so far, and with the least amount of code to boot!! Thanks for posting it:)

# Posted By John Glynn | 16/02/2011 13:58

how do you detect whether or not it is a android tablet or android phone?

# Posted By Duy | 27/03/2012 12:41

Hi,
You could use the screen resolution, but that isn't a hard and fast rule with phone screens getting bigger now.

I give the user the option to switch between mobile or normal, I use a tablet a lot and its horrible to be forced to use a mobile version of a site on it.

# Posted By Shaun McCran | 27/03/2012 13:20

that's what i'm trying to do. i am trying to force people with tablet to use regular site and people with phone or ipod to use mobile site

# Posted By duy | 28/03/2012 18:26

I would consider responsive web design, that way you are not having to maintain multiple version of a site.
http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/awesome-tutorials-...

# Posted By John Glynn | 29/03/2012 11:08

@John, thats a much better idea for the long term. It can be very tricky applying responsive web design retrospectively to a project though, in my experience its something that has to be planned for up front otherwise things start feeling very hacky very quickly.

This sort of thing really separates the designers from the dabblers too :-)

# Posted By Shaun McCran | 01/04/2012 14:10

Hey Shaun,

I agree. Retro-fitting a site to be responsive maybe a mess in the end. I also use the cflocation tag combined with findNoCase to sniff for devices on a couple of sites.

# Posted By John Glynn | 02/04/2012 06:41

There's a great mobile detection script for ColdFusion (and other scripting languages) at http://detectmobilebrowsers.com/

There's also a great Browscap CFC that will provide a struct (based on the data file) that identifies a device's capabilities (and also identify search engines & bots.)
http://browscapcfc.riaforge.org/

# Posted By James Moberg | 20/05/2014 10:43

Hi James,

Thanks for that, I'll give it a try. Always easier if there's something that you can just plug in to your framework to provide the data that you need. Especially if its in a Struct, you can do anything you want with it then :-)

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Simple Coldfusion script to detect if a user is on a Mobile platform