Can a mobile mime type fall back to “html” in Rails?

Question

I\'m using this code (taken from here) in ApplicationController to detect iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad requests:

before_filter :detect_mobile_request, :detec         


        

Answer 1

Here's a simpler solution:

class ApplicationController
    ...
    def formats=(values)
        values << :html if values == [:mobile]
        super(values)
    end
    ...
end

It turns out Rails (3.2.11) adds an :html fallback for requests with the :js format. Here's how it works:

• ActionController::Rendering#process_action assigns the formats array from the request (see action_controller/metal/rendering.rb)
• ActionView::LookupContext#formats= gets called with the result

Here's ActionView::LookupContext#formats=,

# Override formats= to expand ["*/*"] values and automatically
# add :html as fallback to :js.
def formats=(values)
  if values
    values.concat(default_formats) if values.delete "*/*"
    values << :html if values == [:js]
  end
  super(values)
end

This solution is gross but I don't know a better way to get Rails to interpret a request MIME type of "mobile" as formatters [:mobile, :html] - and Rails already does it this way.

Answer 2

The way that I'm handling this is to simply skip_before_filter on those requests that I know I want to render the HTML views for. Obviously, that will work with partials.

If your site has a lot of mobile and/or tablet views, you probably want to set your filter in ApplicationController and skip them in subclasses, but if only a few actions have mobile specific views, you should only call the before filter on those actions/controllers you want.

Answer 3

You can in this case for the format to html. By example you want always use the html in user show method

class UserController

  def show
    ..your_code..
    render :show, :format => :html
  end
end

In this case, if you request show on User controller you render all the time the html version.

If you want render JSON too by example you can made some test about your type like :

class UserController

  def show
    ..your_code..
    if [:mobile, :tablet, :html].include?(request.format)
      render :show, :format => :html
    else
      respond_with(@user)
    end
  end

end