Managing the interface for different types devices with WebAccess

  • 7015962
  • 08-Dec-2014
  • 13-Aug-2015

Environment

Novell GroupWise

Situation

Android tablet does not show the same interface that loads on an iPad
Change the display of a mobile device
Change the default mobile device interface for a specific phone
Change the webaccess view that a device gets based on the user agent of the phone

Resolution

The interface is loaded on devices can be controlled depending on the device that is accessing the server.
  1. Edit the /var/opt/novell/groupwise/webaccess.cfg
  2. Locate the section below
    # Specify the rules to be used when determining the appropriate template
    # interface and content type.
  3. There are two lines for each device underneath the section listed above, they are as follows
    Templates.UserAgent.*.id=
    Templates.UserAgent.*.interface=
  4. Find the type of device that should be modified, EG - Androids are set to simple, but can be changed to mobile if a experience similar to an iPad is desired
  5. Update the Templates.UserAgent*.interface= to the desired setting
  6. Restart Tomcat6

The downside to doing the above solution is that certain changes can be too general and will affect more devices than desired.  If only a specific device should be changed, please follow the steps below.

  1. Navigate to http://www.whatsmyua.com on the device that should be modified
  2. Search for the device section, and then the model entry
  3. Create a new device entry by adding the lines below
    Templates.UserAgent.*.id=*SGH-M919*
    Templates.UserAgent.*.interface=mobile
    Please note: The higher items in the list will take priority.  For instance, if the Android entry is changed to 1, then it will take priority over all Android devices and use simple if that's what it's set to.  Be sure to put the entry near the top of the list so this does not happen.
    Also note: The device used here shows in additional information
  4. Restart Tomcat6
     

Additional Information

The entry below is taken from the navigating to http://www.whatsmyua.com from a Galaxy S3 on the Chrome Browser
Please note:  Certain browsers will give a generic model entry like Android.  In this case it will only work when using the right browser.
{
"ua": "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.4.2; SGH-M919 Build/KOT49H) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.93 Mobile Safari/537.36",
"browser": {
"name": "Chrome",
"version": "39.0.2171.93",
"major": "39"
},
"engine": {
"name": "WebKit",
"version": "537.36"
},
"os": {
"name": "Android",
"version": "4.4.2"
},
"device": {
"model": "SGH-M919",
"vendor": "Samsung",
"type": "mobile"
},
"cpu": {}
}