Introduction
These pages show you how to set up and use the 51Degrees device detection API. For more information on how device detection works and can benefit you, please visit our Device Detection Page . If you’re using our cloud based device detection, you should refer to the Cloud API Documentation pages . All source code, and the free Lite data, is licensed under the Mozilla Public License version 2 .
Get Going With Our Tutorials
Getting started example of using 51Degrees device detection. The example shows how to:
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Set the configuration using a json object
var config = {"dataFile" : "../data/51Degrees-LiteV3.2.dat", "properties" : "IsMobile", "cacheSize" : 10000, "poolSize" : 4 };
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Instantiate the 51Degrees device detection provider with this
connfiguration
var provider = new fiftyonedegrees.provider(config);
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Produce a match for a single HTTP User-Agent header
var match = provider.getMatch(userAgent);
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Extract the value of the IsMobile property
match['IsMobile'];
For more examples see the tutorial pages.
Implementation
Node.js API loads device data from the data file into memory. The amount of memory required will depend on the data file you use.
How Does Device Detection Work
51Degrees device detection implementation does not rely on regular expressions, instead our algorithm looks at character positions in the HTTP User-Agent string and picks a set of signatures that represents the closest match. Then a set of four profiles (one for each of the following components: hardware, software, browser and crawler) is derived from those signatures. Properties and the corresponding values are then derived from those profiles. For more information and examples please see the How Device Detection Works page.
Premium and Enterprise data files can benefit from automatic update capabilities. If you're a Lite user you can contact us for a free evaluation to experience the benefits of automatic updates and check out the extra properties and features that come with Premium and Enterprise data files.
The latest Premium and Enterprise data files can be obtained from the downloads area.
Prerequisites and Compatibility
- Node v6.5.0+
- node-gyp
- g++ 4.8.4+
- SWIG 2.0+