Change User Agent in UIWebView

Question

I have a business need to be able to customize the UserAgent for an embedded UIWebView. (For instance, I\'d like the server to respond differently if, say, a user is using

Answer 1

Actually adding any header field to the NSURLRequest argument in shouldStartLoadWithRequest seems to work, because the request responds to setValue:ForHTTPHeaderField - but it doesn't actually work - the request is sent out without the header.

So I used this workaround in shouldStartLoadWithRequest which just copies the given request to a new mutable request, and re-loads it. This does in fact modify the header which is sent out.

if ( [request valueForHTTPHeaderField:@"MyUserAgent"] == nil )
{
    NSMutableURLRequest *modRequest = [request mutableCopyWithZone:NULL];
    [modRequest setValue:@"myagent" forHTTPHeaderField:@"MyUserAgent"];
    [webViewArgument loadRequest:modRequest];
    return NO;
}

Unfortunately, this still doesn't allow overriding the user-agent http header, which is apparently overwritten by Apple. I guess for overriding it you would have to manage a NSURLConnection by yourself.

Answer 2

Taking everything this is how it was solved for me:

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString: @"http://www.amazon.com"];
    NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
    [request setValue:@"Foobar/1.0" forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];
    [webView loadRequest:request];
}

Thanks Everyone.