Question

I’m writing an application with Flask and I’d like to generate different code for desktop and mobile browsers. IMHO it should be a good idea to keep the application code identical and push the problem of serving different content down the stack at the template level – so it essentially becomes a matter of writing two sets of templates for the two use cases and finding a way to choose the correct one to use at every single request.
I’m using the default Jinja2 template engine with Flask.

I should mention that I have no experience with Flask and I’m learning my way through it while I write code – I’m taking this as an exercise too 🙂

What mechanism would you use to address this problem and keep source code as clean as possible?

Answer 1

Replying to myself 🙂

I ended up using this solution:

import flask
# patch flask.render_template()
_render_template = flask.render_template
def _my_render_template(*args, **kwargs):
    if detect_mobile_browser(flask.request.user_agent.string):
        args = ('m/' + args[0],) + args[1:]
    return _render_template(*args, **kwargs)
flask.render_template = _my_render_template

so far it seems to work, and I just put “mobile templates” in an m/ subdirectory.