Adobe AIR Development

[DifferenceGames]

What is the best way to link to one app from within another?

We have a series of games and would like to cross promote them.  

Another idea could be a link to AppWorld that shows all of our games.  The best way I can do this right now on the PlayBook is to search for DifferenceGames.  

Is there a way to pull up AppWorld and have it execute and display a search result?

[peter9477]

There should be an "app:" or "appworld:" (or similar) URL that we can use in navigateToURL(), but I haven't yet seen details on the format of the data that would follow. Probably an app id number of some kind, but I don't know.

For now, perhaps just use a regular URL directly to your page in the web-based app world, so it will launch the web browser instead.

[Ebscer]

You can kindof do this. For example

navigateToURL(new URLRequest(“http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/1839″))

will actually launch BlackBerry AppWorld. This is however a bit of a hack. For more details see http://news.ebscer.com/2011/05/how-to-invoke-appworld-in-actionscript/

[peter9477]

FYI, the URL scheme is "appworld:", though with only a bit of experimentation so far I haven't been able to get it to open the page for a given app, just the App World app itself.  You can do that with this:

navigateToURL(new URLRequest('appworld://'));

If some enterprising young fellow wants to experiment further and figure out what the path/parameters may look like to get the job done, that would be worth some kudos.

[DifferenceGames]

Thanks guys!  This is very helpful.  If I find out anymore details I'll post here again.

[studiochris · Accepted solution]

Here's the URL scheme. Pretty easy to use.

appworld://content/1839

RESPONSE
HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
Server: AkamaiGHost
Content-Length: 0
Location: appworld://content/1839
Date: Fri, 06 May 2011 16:54:54 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

REQUEST
GET /webstore/content/1839 HTTP/1.1
Host: appworld.blackberry.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (PlayBook; U; RIM Tablet OS 1.0.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/0.0.1 Safari/534.8+
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.8,en-gb;q=0.5,en-ca;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: UTF-8,*
Keep-Alive: 115
Connection: keep-alive

[peter9477]

@studiochris, is that from some docs, or just good guesswork?

[DifferenceGames]

I'll confirm that this works beautifully!

Thanks so much!

[studiochris]

It's from spoofing the PlayBook Browser's User Agent in Firefox and seeing where the request is redirectedwhen navigating to a URL in App World. That particular URL probably won't work on PlayBook since it's to a phone app, but tablet apps should since that's where RIM is sending the requests.

[HybridMind]

I see that does work great.  Very cool!  I realized now why trying the same thing with "appworld://vendor/xxxx" doesn't work.  There isn't a "vendor" equivalent page in the App World that I can find!  Seems like the only way you can do cross promotion currently is to manually build little buttons with thumbs in your game/app that link direct to those apps.  I was hoping to just have a general "visit my vendor page" kind of button that showed all my games.  No such luck I guess.  At least thanks to your reverse engineering here you can build a manual page anyway. Thanks.