anyway to differentiate request from users via browsers and request from web API ?

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am filtering requests to determine the browsers used by visitors and eventually give him back a warning about supported browsers ... In the application_controller.rb I have a filter

before_filter :ensure_browser_supported

and a method to test the user_agent ( iE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and their versions...)

  def ensure_browser_supported     if html? && cookies[:browser_unsupported] != 'false' && user_agent.unsupported? && session[:browser_unsupported].blank?       session[:return_to] = request.fullpath       render :template => "/layouts/unsupported_browser", :layout => false     end   end

Doing some testing on external API request I'll have to answer, I sent a curl request and discover that it obviously failed passing the test as the user agent is "HTTP_USER_AGENT"=>"curl/7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) but I guess that a request from a remote server will have another user_agent .... am I right ?

I can add this user agent in the list , but is there any way to differentiate request from browsers and from remote servers before filtering the browsers... what could I check in the request ?

thanks for your feedback

2

I could be wrong, but I don’t think there is, that’s what the User Agent is for.

3

Thanks, so I'll modify my code to filter only specific browser & versions and accept other User Agent

erwin