I want to dynamically change the layout, based on whether the user is accessing the site from a mobile device or not. I have a few questions on the subject.
I would like to change the layout once it's determined, but before the view is rendered. That is, is there some hook I can use where I can change layout.cshtml
to layout.mobile.cshtml
"recursively" for any nested layouts that there might be.
Is overriding RazorViewEngine
's CreateView
method enough? It takes a masterPath
parameter, so maybe I could implement a custom RazorViewEngine
and override this method, right?
The second question would be regarding mobile browser detection. I don't really care that much about specific devices. I just want to differentiate desktop from mobile. Is something like WURFL
a necessity in this case?
Is checking something like Request.Browser.ScreenPixelsWidth
and ScreenPixelsHeigth
ridiculous? (since most I'd be changing would be using or not jQuery.mobile
and it's data-attributes.
This functionality is built-into ASP.NET MVC 4 so you get it out-of-the-box.
Scott Hansleman blogged about how you could achieve the same in ASP.NET MVC 3 and be ready for the upgrade because the NuGet he suggested is spec-compatible with ASP.NET MVC 4.