Django-SmartAgent

Description

Installation

Install from PyPI

pip install django-smartagent

#or

easy_install django-smartagent

To install the app add smartagent to INSTALLED_APPS

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'smartagent',
    ...
)

Add the middleware

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = (
    ...
    'smartagent.middleware.UserAgentDetectorMiddleware',
)

The middleware is used to attach the browser characteristics to the request object, which will be accessible through request.browser_info

User-Agent data file

Django-SmartAgent comes pre-packaged with a data file containing browser info agents_basic.pkl. The datafile is built using various resources on the net and generated to be made compatible with the library.

You can grab the latest datafile from github https://github.com/jamespacileo/django-smartagent/downloads.

Once you grab the latest data file, place it under your project folder. To inform Django-SmartAgent of the file location you need to edit settings.py by adding:

SMART_AGENT_SETTINGS = {
    'AGENT_DATASET_LOCATION': '/path/to/agent_data_set.pkl',
}

Utilities for mobile sites

As it is popular for sites to have a mobile version, there are a few utility methods within the project.

A render_to decorator (based on django-annoying's render_to) renders a page using a desktop or mobile version of a site, depending if the user-agent is a mobile device or not.

@render_to(template='desktop_template.html', mobile_template='mobile_template.html')
def page(request):

    articles = Articles.objects.all()[:30]
    return {
        'articles': articles,
    }

which is the equivalent of:

def page(request):

    articles = Articles.objects.all()[:30]
    if request.browser_info.get('ismobiledevice') and not request.session.get('force_desktop_version'):
        return render_to_response('mobile_tempalte.html', {'articles':articles, },
                                                           context_instance=RequestContext(request))
    return render_to_response('desktop_tempalte.html', {'articles':articles, },
                                                        context_instance=RequestContext(request))

Two utility URLs exist which are used to force/unforce the desktop vesion of the site. This is due to users not always wanting to view the mobile version of the site.

• smartagent/force_desktop_version/ forces the desktop version for mobile sites
• smartagent/unforce_desktop_version unforces the desktop version, forcing mobile devices to view the mobile version

urlpatterns = patterns('',
    ...
    (r'^smartagent/', include('smartagent.urls')))

Settings

A settings variable can be added to your project settings.

The structure is the following:

SMART_AGENT_SETTINGS = {
    'AGENT_DATASET_LOCATION': 'agents.pk',
}

Usage

django-smartagent adds the browser_info dictionary to the request object containing features associated with the user's browser.