Django views detect if client uses webgl compatible browser

Question

Is there any option to detect in the view function if the browser from which the user is coming is webGL compatible or not?

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

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Detecting WebGL is a matter of using JavaScript on the frontend (see Proper way to detect WebGL support?), so I don't think there is a way to do this directly in the backend in a Django view.

What you could do is perform the detection with JavaScript on the first page the user visits and use AJAX to store the result in a server-side variable which you can use in subsequent requests to decide whether to use WebGL features or not.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:30

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answered Jan 05 '17 at 13:25

voodoo-burger

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Is there a way that this information is given through the request? Same as the requests gives GET, POST, COOKIES, etc.. so it also gives WEBGLCOMPATIBLE or similar called variable – Ignasi Jan 05 '17 at 13:46
@Ignasi not that I know of. – voodoo-burger Jan 05 '17 at 13:48
Thank you very much @voodoo-burger! – Ignasi Jan 05 '17 at 13:53

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 05 '17 at 15:53

Expanding on voodoo's answer, here is the javascript to quickly determine wheter a client has webgl support

    var canvas = document.getElementById("canvas");
    var names = ["webgl", "experimental-webgl", "webkit-3d", "mozwebgl"];
    var webgl_supported = false;

    for(var i in names) {
        try {
            gl = canvas.getContext(names[i], { });

            if (gl && typeof gl.getParameter == "function") {
                webgl_supported = true;
                break;
            }
        } catch(e) { }
    }

   var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest();
   xmlhttp.open("POST", "/webgl_enabled_handler");
   xmlhttp.setRequestHeader("Content-Type", "application/json; charset=UTF-8");
   xmlhttp.send(JSON.stringify({webgl_enabled: webgl_supported }));

This assumes that in your html page/template there's a canvas element with id "canvas".

The resulting json would be sent as a POST request to django after page loads

Unfortunately I doubt there's a way to determine webgl support through a general GET request from django

FYI: "webkil-3d" and "mozwebgl" are not needed. They were a thing for a few months in like 2010 and are long gone. Similarly "experimental-webgl" is only used by Edge at this point because it's WebGL implementation is still not spec compliant. — gman, Jan 06 '17 at 03:06

Django views detect if client uses webgl compatible browser

2 Answers2