.NET Getting Started Tutorial

What's Covered

This tutorial illustrates the basic use of the 51Degrees API. It will show you how to create a provider, how to create a dataset and how to obtain a value for the IsMobile property.

Code and Explanation

Getting started example of using 51Degrees device detection. The example shows how to:

Set the data set for the 51Degrees detector

												
string fileName = args[0];
DataSet dataSet = StreamFactory.Create(fileName, false);

Instantiate the 51Degrees device detection provider with these settings

									
Provider provider = new Provider(dataSet);

Produce a match for a single HTTP User-Agent

									
match = provider.Match(userAgent);

Extract the value of the IsMobile property

									
IsMobile = match["IsMobile"].ToString();

This tutorial assumes you are building this from within the 51Degrees Visual Studio solution. Running the executable produced inside Visual Studio will ensure all the command line arguments are preset correctly. If you are running outside of Visual Studio, make sure to add the path to a 51Degrees data file as an argument.

Full Source File

												
        public static void Run(string fileName)
        {
            // DataSet is the object used to interact with the data file.
            // StreamFactory creates Dataset with pool of binary readers to 
            // perform device lookup using file on disk. The type if 
            // disposable and is therefore contained in using block to 
            // ensure file handles and resources are freed.
            using (DataSet dataSet = StreamFactory.Create(fileName, false))
            {
                // Provides access to device detection functions.
                Provider provider = new Provider(dataSet);

                // Used to store and access detection results.
                Match match;

                // Contains detection result for the IsMobile property.
                string IsMobile;

                // User-Agent string of an iPhone mobile device.
                string mobileUserAgent = ("Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone " +
                    "OS 7_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.2 (KHTML, like " +
                    "Gecko) 'Version/7.0 Mobile/11D167 Safari/9537.53");

                // User-Agent string of Firefox Web browser version 41 on desktop.
                string desktopUserAgent = ("Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; " +
                    "WOW64; rv:41.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/41.0");

                // User-Agent string of a MediaHub device.
                string mediaHubUserAgent = ("Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android " +
                    "4.4.2; X7 Quad Core Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 " +
                    "(KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/30.0.0.0 " +
                    "Safari/537.36");

                Console.WriteLine("Staring Getting Started Example.");

                // Carries out a match for a mobile User-Agent.
                Console.WriteLine("\nMobile User-Agent: " + mobileUserAgent);
                match = provider.Match(mobileUserAgent);
                IsMobile = match["IsMobile"].ToString();
                Console.WriteLine("   IsMobile: " + IsMobile);

                // Carries out a match for a desktop User-Agent.
                Console.WriteLine("\nDesktop User-Agent: " + desktopUserAgent);
                match = provider.Match(desktopUserAgent);
                IsMobile = match["IsMobile"].ToString();
                Console.WriteLine("   IsMobile: " + IsMobile);

                // Carries out a match for a MediaHub User-Agent.
                Console.WriteLine("\nMediaHub User-Agent: " + mediaHubUserAgent);
                match = provider.Match(mediaHubUserAgent);
                IsMobile = match["IsMobile"].ToString();
                Console.WriteLine("   IsMobile: " + IsMobile);

                // Returns the number of profiles that are Mobile.
                Console.WriteLine("\nNumber of mobile profiles: {0}", 
                    dataSet.FindProfiles("IsMobile", "True").Length);
            }
        }

Full Source File

Summary

In this tutorial you have seen how to use the detector to retrieve the IsMobile property for a pre-defined User-Agent string. The example can easily be modified to retrieve the value of any other property. Premium and Enterprise data files provide considerably more properties such as IsCrawler , PriceBand , HardwareVendor and ScreenInchesWidth . For a full list of properties and the data file versions they exist in please see the Property Dictionary .