Mobile Rails

Mobile_rails is a gem designed for integrating cross-platform mobile web application with rails application.

What mobile_rails does:

• Adding plubming for detecting mobile device browser
• Setting up a mobile mime type as rails response format
• Adding a session variable to allow user switch between mobile and web interfaces.

Mobile_rails can be used with mobile_rails_jqm which is a gem packaged jQuery Mobile 1.0 final with a mobile_rails layout generator.

How mobile_rails works:

1 Web request stays the same.

2 Mobile request comes in, mobile layout is selected and request mime format is set to .mobile.

3 User gets a mobile optimized view of your app.

4 A link/action can be used to set a session variable for viewing the full web version on mobile device.

Getting Started

Include the Gem

gem 'mobile_rails'

Run this:

$ bundle install
$ rails g mobile_rails:install

Add this in your app/controller/application_controller.rb

  has_mobile_rails

Remove require_tree . from both application.js and css.js in your app/assets directory to not load mobile.js and mobile.css.

You are almost done. Next step is to choose a javascript mobile framework you like, create a mobile.mobile.haml(or .erb) layout in your app/view/layout folder. Then in your controller allow respond_to mobile format and treat your mobile page like normal view but with a name like 'index.mobile.haml'. Web request will render the html version and mobile request will look for the .mobile.haml file.

More Info

• A 'mobile?' helper method is added to your controller and view to detect if the user is using a mobile devise.
• 'session[:mobile_session]' is used to turn on and off mobile rendering. set to '1' for on and '0' for off.

i.e. If you want to give user a choice to view full web version on their mobile device:

add this to your view:

= link_to "Web Version", home_web_url, :rel => "external"

then in your home_controller:

  def web
    session[:mobile_session] = 0
    redirect_to root_url
  end

If you want to use jQuery Mobile, please checkout mobile_rails_jqm.

Example of how this gem can be used: mobile_rails_example