How to customize SharePoint 2010 mobile view

Question

I am stuck on developing a mobile view for my SP2010 publishing portal. It is Internet-facing with custom pages / web parts (e.g. http://server/Pages/customPage.aspx with custom webparts on it). The site has a custom master page.

I am having the following issues with the built-in mobile functionality:

1. The welcome page. Navigating to http://server/?Mobile=1 redirects me to http://server/_layouts/mobile/mbllists.aspx, which just shows a table of lists / document libraries available. For my portal, I want to show a dashboard, just like I currently do for the "normal" non-mobile view.

2. Navigating to one of my custom pages (e.g. http://server/Pages/customPage.aspx?Mobile=1) also redirects to http://server/_layouts/mobile/mbllists.aspx.

So in effect there is really no helpful built-in mobile support at all; just the ability to view lists with a mobile device.

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So I have a number of issues and I'm hoping for some high-level help. My thought is that I should do the following tasks:

1. Create a separate master page for mobile
2. Figure out how to choose this master page based on "is client a mobile device?"
3. Figure out how to prevent the redirection to /_layouts/mobile/mbllists.aspx

Then I think the mobile site will operate similarly to the normal site.

What do you think? Am I on the right track?

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This is a cross post with Stack Overflow; I realize this site is more specific to SharePoint, but SO has a bigger community so I do not find it redundant.

Answer 1

Randy Drisgill has an article about mobile views. Basically any smartphone should be able to view the site normally. You just need to manipulate the App_Browsers compat file.

C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wss\VirtualDirectories\portal.contoso.com80\App_Browsers\compat.browse

This file has settings for MANY popular browsers, including most mobile browsers. In my example I want to change the mobile setting for the iPhone browser so I found this section:

<!-- iPhone Safari Browser --> <!-- sample UA "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U;
 CPU iPhone OS 2_0 like Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML,
 like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5A345 Safari/525.20" --> <browser
 id="iPhoneSafari" parentID="AppleSafari"> <identification> <userAgent
 match="iPhone" /> <userAgent match="Mobile" /> </identification>
 <capabilities> <capability name="isMobileDevice" value="true" />
 <capability name="canInitiateVoiceCall" value="true" /> <capability
 name="optimumPageWeight" value="1500" /> <capability
 name="requiresViewportMetaTag" value="true" /> <capability
 name="supportsTouchScreen" value="true" /> <capability
 name="telephoneNumberDetectionDisabled" value="true" />
 </capabilities> </browser>