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Device Group Manager ConceptsLocate this document in the navigation structure

Use

The device group mechanism relies on the following three entities:

  • Device groups

  • Device types

  • User agents

Device Groups

A device group is an object that contains one or more user agent definitions. The portal provides three predefined device groups: Desktop , Smartphone , and Tablet . Each device group is provided by default with its own user agent definitions. You can create new device groups or modify the predefined device groups if needed.

You can use device groups in a rule collection to determine which desktop to display at runtime for all user agents that match a specific device group. For more information, see Configuring Desktop Display Rules for Mobile Devices .

Device Types

The portal provides three predefined device types: Desktop , Smartphone , and Tablet . By default, each device type is associated with a predefined device group. Each device group must be associated with a single device type, but multiple device groups can be associated with the same device type.

Device types cannot be modified, and you cannot add or remove them. However, you can specify which device groups they are associated with.

You can use device types in a rule collection to determine which desktop to display at runtime for user agents that match a device group with the specified type. Using device types (instead of device groups) in a rule collection enables you to assign the same desktop to more than one device group (of the same type) using a single IF statement. For more information, see Configuring Desktop Display Rules for Mobile Devices .

You can also use device types if you need to refer to a static value in a custom-developed application, to enable specific behavior based on the type of device being used to access the portal.

User Agents

A user agent is the string sent by the device or browser that is used to access SAP NetWeaver Portal. The portal enables you to group different types of end user access devices by adding their user agent definitions to device groups. A user agent definition defines an access device, either by an explicit string, such as Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.3.4; fr-fr; HTC Desire Build/GRJ22) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1 , or by using regular expression syntax. For example, the regular expression Android 2\. matches both Android 2.3.4 and Android 2.3.5 .