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Device Detection and Browser Sniffing

Device detection and browser sniffing are very useful when building mobile applications. The Dojo API dojo/has module can be used to inspect the browser and platform. See the Feature column in the Feature Names table for the dojo/has module.

Device Detection

The code snippet below can be used to detect if the device supports touch.

define(["dojo/has"], function(has){
  // --------------------------------------------------------------------
  // Environment is running on the browser platform
  // check if the device supports touch
  // touch-events
  // --------------------------------------------------------------------
  if (has("host-browser") && has("touch")) {
    // touch specific code
  }
  else {
    // non-touch specific code
  }
});

Browser Sniffing

When building mobile applications you generally will target a smartphone, tablet, and the desktop. Targeting several different types of screens (devices) (including the desktop) will require support for several browsers. The Dojo API dojo/sniff module can also be used to detect the user's browser and version.

require(["dojo/sniff"], function(sniff) {
  if(sniff("android") > 5 && sniff("chrome") > 44) {
    // --------------------------------------------------------------------
    // Android Platform:
    // Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58K)
    // AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
    // Chrome/46.0.2490.76 Mobile Safari/537.36
    // --------------------------------------------------------------------
    console.log("Android Platform: %s", navigator.userAgent);
  }
  else if(sniff("ios") > 8 && sniff("safari") > 7) {
    // --------------------------------------------------------------------
    // iOS Platform: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 9_1 like Mac OS X)
    // AppleWebKit/601.1.46 (KHTML, like Gecko)
    // Version/9.0 Mobile/13B143 Safari/601.1
    // --------------------------------------------------------------------
    console.log("iOS Platform: %s", navigator.userAgent);
  }
});

Additional information about dojo's has and sniff api can be found here.

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