UIWebView: Forcing non-mobile web pages possible?

rakolta · January 2009

When specifying a URL using UIWebView, is there a way to force web sites (like google.com) to provide the original (non-mobile) version of the web pages?

RickMaddy · January 2009

If you set the user agent header to something that makes it appear the request is coming from a desktop browser instead of a mobile browser you will most likely get what you want.

rakolta · January 2009

Thanks.

I searched the web on how to do this, no luck.

I found examples that use:

[webView setCustomUserAgent:@"...

but I have no idea how to get Iphone SDK to access this method.

Any more hints?

RickMaddy · January 2009

Setup a UIWebViewDelegate and in the method 'webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:' you can cast the NSURLRequest as an NSMutableURLRequest. Once you have that you can do:


[mutableRequest setValue:@\"some appropriate user agent string\" forHTTPHeaderField:@\"User-Agent\"];

I'm not 100% positive about being able to cast the request to a mutable request. I thought I was doing that in one of my apps but now I can't find the code. If the casting fails at runtime, then you will need to create a new mutable request based on the original request.

rakolta · January 2009

I tried the following:

NSString *urlString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"http://google.com"];
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setValue:@"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)" forHTTPHeaderField@"User-Agent"];
[webView loadRequest:request];

This loads the URL, but the changing of the "User-Agent" seems to have no effect. Perhaps the Iphone simulator is overriding any changes to this field.

Anyway, thanks for getting me in the right direction.

kusolito · February 2009

Hi,

I tried below, but didn't work. Can anyone help?

[myWebView loadRequest:[NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"https://myurl.com/"]]];

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType {
[(NSMutableURLRequest *) request setValue:@"Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20" forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];
return true;
}

Bunglero · May 2009

Here is what I did which worked for me. It does not seem to be possible to overwrite the User-Agent from the NSURLRequest, as it seems that this header gets written over when the request goes out. However, you are able to add custom defined header key/value pairs. These key/values would not show up in the normal server request logs, but they can be tapped, for instance, with PHP:

In the Obj-C:

NSString *urlString = [NSString stringWithFormat:@\"http://myURL.com\"];
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:urlString];
NSMutableURLRequest *request = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[request setValue:@\"My-Special-Agent/1.0\" forHTTPHeaderField:@\"My-User-Agent\"];
[webView loadRequest:request];

...then in PHP (using Apache server):

echo \"<pre>\";
print_r(apache_request_headers());
echo \"</pre>\";

That should give you a list of all the header key/values including your custom ones. I'm not an Apache expert, but it would seem to me that there should be a way of logging this custom header info in the normal request logs, if that's where you need them.

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