How To Set A Custom Header For Webview Requests In React-native

I want to be able to detect on my ruby on rails server side that a http request has come from a webView component in my app. The app is using react-native. In particular, I want to

Solution 1:

Try adding the following lines to AppDelegate.m to set the custom user-agent

NSString *newAgent = @"GolfMentor";
NSDictionary *dictionnary = [[NSDictionary alloc] initWithObjectsAndKeys:newAgent, @"UserAgent", nil];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:dictionnary];

A fuller answer and the solution for android can be found here.

Solution 2:

I kind of doubt you will be able to do this. If it is not exposed as a prop you can set on the WebView component React Native provides, then I don't think you can do it.

As an aside, the WebView component in React Native is not that awesome. On the iOS side it wraps UIWebView, but for iOS 8+ there is WkWebView, which is more standards-compliant and considerably faster than UIWebView.

http://blog.initlabs.com/post/100113463211/wkwebview-vs-uiwebview

I am currently working on an app that makes extensive use of webviews, and we wound up writing our own native components for iOS and Android. This is easier than it sounds, especially if you already have native development experience. So if you're doing a lot with webviews, and the out-of-the-box component doesn't give you what you want (and you want the added benefits of WkWebView vs. UIWebView), I would consider rolling your own.