In my previous blog posts, I have demonstrated a simple web app using ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First. In this post, I will be focus on making this
application for
mobile devices. A single web site will be used for both
mobile browsers and desktop browsers. If users are accessing the web app from
mobile browsers, users will be redirect to
mobile specific pages and will get normal pages if users are accessing from desktop browsers. In this demo app, the
mobile specific pages are maintained in an ASP.NET MVC Area named
Mobile and
mobile users will be redirect to MVC Area
Mobile. Let’s add a new area named
Mobile to the ASP.NET MVC app. For adding Area, right click the ASP.NET MVC project and select Area from Add option. Our
mobile specific pages using jQuery
Mobile will be maintained in the
Mobile Area. ASP.NET MVC Global filter for redirecting
mobile visitors to
Mobile area Let’s add an ASP.NET MVC Global filter for redirecting
mobile visitors to
Mobile area. The below Global filter is taken from the sample app http://aspnetmobilesamples.codeplex.com/ created by the ASP.NET team. The below filer will redirect the
Mobile visitors to an ASP.NET MVC Area
Mobile. public class RedirectMobileDevicesToMobileAreaAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute { protected override bool AuthorizeCore(System.Web.HttpContextBase httpContext) { // Only redirect on the first request in a session if (!httpContext.Session.IsNewSession) return true; // Don't redirect non-mobile browsers if (!httpContext.Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice) return true; // Don't redirect requests for the
Mobile area if (Regex.IsMatch(httpContext.Request.Url.PathAndQuery, "/Mobile($|/)")) return true; return false; } protected override void HandleUnauthorizedRequest(AuthorizationContext filterContext) { var redirectionRouteValues = GetRedirectionRouteValues(filterContext.RequestContext); filterContext.Result = new RedirectToRouteResult(redirectionRouteValues); } // Override this method if you want to customize the controller/action/parameters to which //
mobile users would be redirected. This lets you redirect users to the
mobile equivalent // of whatever resource they originally requested. protected virtual RouteValueDictionary GetRedirectionRouteValues(RequestContext requestContext) { return new RouteValueDictionary(new { area = "Mobile", controller = "Home", action = "Index" }); } } Let’s add the global filer RedirectMobileDevicesToMobileAreaAttribute to the global filter collection in the Application_Start() of Global.asax.cs file GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(new RedirectMobileDevicesToMobileAreaAttribute(), 1); Now your
mobile visitors will be redirect to the
Mobile area. But the browser detection logic in the RedirectMobileDevicesToMobileAreaAttribute filter will not be working in some modern browsers and some conditions. But the good news is that ASP.NET’s browser detection feature is extensible and will be greatly working with the open source framework 51Degrees.mobi. 51Degrees.mobi is a Browser Capabilities Provider that will be working with ASP.NET’s Request.Browser and will provide more accurate and detailed information. For more details visit the documentation page at http://51degrees.codeplex.com/documentation. Let’s add a reference to 51Degrees.mobi library using NuGet We can easily add the 51Degrees.mobi from NuGet and this will update the web.config for necessary configuartions.
Mobile Web App using jQuery
Mobile Framework jQuery
Mobile Framework is built on top of jQuery that provides top-of-the-line JavaScript in a unified User Interface that works across the most-used smartphone web browsers and tablet form factors. It provides an easy way to develop user interfaces for
mobile web apps. The current version of the framework is jQuery
Mobile Alpha 3. We need to include the following files to use jQuery
Mobile. The jQuery
Mobile CSS file (jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.css) The jQuery library (jquery-1.5.min.js) The jQuery
Mobile library (jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.js) Let’s add the required jQuery files directly from jQuery CDN . You can download the files and host them on your own server. jQuery
Mobile page structure The basic jQuery
Mobile page structure is given below <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Page Title</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a3/jquery.mobile-1.0a1.min.css" /> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.min.js"></script> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a3/jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.js"></script> </head> <body> <div data-role="page"> <div data-role="header"> <h1>Page Title</h1> </div> <div data-role="content"> <p>Page content goes here.</p> </div> <div data-role="footer"> <h4>Page Footer</h4> </div> </div> </body> </html> The data- attributes are the new feature of HTML5 so that jQuery
Mobile will be working on browsers that supporting HTML 5. You can get a detailed browser support details from http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/ . In the Head section we have included the Core jQuery javascript file and jQuery
Mobile Library and the core CSS Library for the UI Element Styling. These jQuery files are minified versions and will improve the performance of page load on
Mobile Devices. The jQuery
Mobile pages are identified with an element with the data-role="page" attribute inside the <body> tag. <div data-role="page"> </div> Within the "page" container, any valid HTML markup can be used, but for typical pages in jQuery
Mobile, the immediate children of a "page" are div element with data-roles of "header", "content", and "footer". <div data-role="page"> <div data-role="header">...</div> <div data-role="content">...</div> <div data-role="footer">...</div> </div> The div data-role="content" holds the main content of the HTML page and will be used for making user interaction elements. The div data-role="header" is header part of the page and div data-role="footer" is the footer part of the page. Creating
Mobile specific pages in the
Mobile Area Let’s create Layout page for our
Mobile area <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>@ViewBag.Title</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a3/jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.css" /> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.min.js"></script> <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a3/jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.js"></script> </head> <body> @RenderBody() </body> </html> In the Layout page, I have given reference to jQuery
Mobile JavaScript files and the CSS file. Let’s add an Index view page Index.chtml @{ ViewBag.Title = "Index"; } <div data-role="page"> <div data-role="header"> <h1>Expense Tracker Mobile</h1> </div> <div data-role="content"> <ul data-role="listview"> <li>@Html.Partial("_LogOnPartial")</li> <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li> <li>@Html.ActionLink("Category", "Index", "Category")</li> <li>@Html.ActionLink("Expense", "Index", "Expense")</li> </ul> </div> <div data-role="footer"> Shiju Varghese | <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese">Blog </a> | <a href="http://twitter.com/shijucv">Twitter</a> </div> </div> In the Index page, we have used data-role “listview” for showing our content as List View Let’s create a data entry screen create.cshtml @model MyFinance.Domain.Category @{ ViewBag.Title = "Create Category"; } <div data-role="page"> <div data-role="header"> <h1>Create Category</h1> @Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index","Home",null, new { @class = "ui-btn-right" }) </div> <div data-role="content"> @using (Html.BeginForm("Create","Category",FormMethod.Post)) { <div data-role="fieldcontain"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Name) <div> @Html.ValidationMessageFor(m => m.Name) </div> </div> <div data-role="fieldcontain"> @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Description) @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Description) </div> <div class="ui-body ui-body-b"> <button type="submit" data-role="button" data-theme="b">Save</button> </div> } </div> </div> In jQuery
Mobile, the form elements should be placed inside the data-role="fieldcontain" The below screen shots show the pages rendered in
mobile browser Index Page Create Page Source Code You can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com Summary We have created a single web app for desktop browsers and
mobile browsers. If a user access the site from desktop browsers, users will get normal web pages and get
mobile specific pages if users access from
mobile browsers. If users are accessing the website from
mobile devices, we will redirect to a ASP.NET MVC area
Mobile. For redirecting to the
Mobile area, we have used a Global filer for the redirection logic and used open source framework 51Degrees.mobi for the better support for
mobile browser detection. In the
Mobile area, we have created the pages using jQuery
Mobile and users will get
mobile friendly web pages. We can create great
mobile web apps using ASP.NET MVC and jQuery
Mobile Framework.
