The short answer is no.
We either know the property you are looking for or we don't.
We decided that developers are better suited at deciding what fallback/default value to use as this may vary depending on your usage and you may want to know when this is happening and control it.
The long answer...
The way our data is structured means that occasionally a device will inherit a property from another if their User-Agent is a super-set of the other's. (This usually occurs if the
device you are querying for is some network operator's "re-brand" of another device. i.e. There are unlikely to be any major differences besides the name.)
The longer answer...
Assume you have a device with the user agent "NokiaN95" and the device has the property "mp3 = true". Assume we also have a device in our data with the UA "NokiaN95e" for some special edition N95 that I just made up. Assuming we have no data about this device with regards to "mp3" a query against the API with the UA "NokiaN95e" will still return true for "mp3".
Why? The API gathers properties from the data tree as it walks the UA string. If we had a property for the N95e that was different to the N95 ( i.e. we values for both and they are different) there would be a flag in the data instructing the API to keep walking the data tree beyond the "5" as there is better data deeper down.
So this, in effect, looks like a fallback. Most of the time, if we don't know a property the API will return null or raise an UnknownProperty exception which you can catch and handle as you please. (Log and report back to us if you can).
In a very small number of cases (usually when your request is for some specialised device or special release) you will get a value that has been inherited from what is almost guaranteed to be the same device before it was rebranded by a network operator.
This is very different to WURFL in which all devices inherit from a hierarchy of generic devices and as such always have a value for all properties, whether they are correct or not.
Posted by adrian.hopebailie 2 years ago
The short answer is no.
We either know the property you are looking for or we don't.
We decided that developers are better suited at deciding what fallback/default value to use as this may vary depending on your usage and you may want to know when this is happening and control it.
The long answer...
The way our data is structured means that occasionally a device will inherit a property from another if their User-Agent is a super-set of the other's. (This usually occurs if the
device you are querying for is some network operator's "re-brand" of another device. i.e. There are unlikely to be any major differences besides the name.)
The longer answer...
Assume you have a device with the user agent "NokiaN95" and the device has the property "mp3 = true". Assume we also have a device in our data with the UA "NokiaN95e" for some special edition N95 that I just made up. Assuming we have no data about this device with regards to "mp3" a query against the API with the UA "NokiaN95e" will still return true for "mp3".
Why? The API gathers properties from the data tree as it walks the UA string. If we had a property for the N95e that was different to the N95 ( i.e. we values for both and they are different) there would be a flag in the data instructing the API to keep walking the data tree beyond the "5" as there is better data deeper down.
So this, in effect, looks like a fallback. Most of the time, if we don't know a property the API will return null or raise an UnknownProperty exception which you can catch and handle as you please. (Log and report back to us if you can).
In a very small number of cases (usually when your request is for some specialised device or special release) you will get a value that has been inherited from what is almost guaranteed to be the same device before it was rebranded by a network operator.
This is very different to WURFL in which all devices inherit from a hierarchy of generic devices and as such always have a value for all properties, whether they are correct or not.
Adrian Hope-BailiedotMobi
Posted by ph3n0m 2 years ago
Adrian, appreciate the answer - and yes, will log any such issues