README.md

Deep Linking

Deep Links are how external users deep can navigate into your app with a URL. The steps for enabling deep linking in your app are to:

1. Add a URL scheme.
2. Define your deep links.
3. Handle them.
4. Test

Adding a URL scheme

Open up your project and go to Target > Info > URL Types and add the following:

Define your deep links

We are going to support two deep links into the app:

• starbucks://scan
• starbucks://home

And we will represent the host part of the URL in an enum.

DeepLink.swift

import Foundation

enum DeepLink: String {
    case home
    case scan
}

Handle URLs

To handle the URL we need to go into our AppDelegate.swift and parse the incoming request, and convert it into a DeepLink that we can hand off to our MainViewController for processing.

AppDelegate.swift

    func application(_ app: UIApplication, open url: URL, options: [UIApplication.OpenURLOptionsKey : Any] = [:]) -> Bool {
        /*
         <scheme>://<host>
         starbucks://home
         starbucks://scan
         */
    
        // Process the URL.
        guard let components = NSURLComponents(url: url, resolvingAgainstBaseURL: true),
              let host = components.host else {
            print("Invalid URL")
            return false
        }
                
        print("components: \(components)")
        
        // Create the deep link
        guard let deeplink = DeepLink(rawValue: host) else {
            print("Deeplink not found: \(host)")
            return false
        }

        // Hand off to mainViewController
        mainViewController.handleDeepLink(deeplink)
        
        return true
    }

Once in the MainViewController with the deeplink we can do whatever we want. Here we just manually navigate to the view controller in the tab bar we want to present.

MainViewController.swift

// MARK: Deep Link

extension MainViewController {
    func handleDeepLink(_ deepLink: DeepLink) {
        switch deepLink {
        case .home:
            presentTabBar(withIndex: 0)
        case .scan:
            presentTabBar(withIndex: 1)

        }
    }
}

Test

You can try deeplinking into your app by firing up Safari in your simulator and enter your URL in there (i.e. starbucks://home).

Or an even better way is to execute deeplinks from the command line while your simulator is running with this command here:

xcrun simctl openurl booted starbucks://home

xcrun simctl openurl booted starbucks://scan

Example

See Demo directory for full source.

Links that help

• Defining URL Schemes Apple
• Universal Links
• Deep Links vs Universal Links