Understanding URL Encoding
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You know how chaining multiple actions can turn what was once a simple url on the Cthulhu of hyperlinks. My head twirls on the subject and I bet so do yours and as my actions became more and more complex over time, I realized it was time to take a step back and study how url encoding works across our actions and multiple apps.
Reading a URL scheme
The first steps to understand what a url does is to picture the elements that compose it and since we’re exploring the depths of URL encoding, we can divide a URL action as calls, fields and queries.
I’ll explain each one of the elements with analogies that would make Scott Forstall proud. First, there is the CALL
, which can be interpreted as a phone number. One app calls the other, in the previous example we’re calling Drafts in the create
extension.
We’re calling Drafts because we’re requesting one of the services it provides, however, Drafts requires information to perform it, so we send a letter1 in an envelope entitled TEXT. For each parameter requested by Drafts, we’d send one envelope. Each envelope label is a FIELD
and they're responsible for specifying where we want Drafts to apply our letter contents.
You sent the letter, you made the call. Drafts finally picks up and receives the envelope, then it hangs up. How rude. Drafts will now open the envelope and check the letter, which is our QUERY
and contains what we want Drafts to parse as text, which is the title in the envelope. The act of sealing/opening the envelope is what we call URL encoding/decoding.
Technology.
How URL encoding works
The best way to comprehend why we must url encode contents is paying attention to who carries out the actions in the story above. You, the first app, is making the call and sending the envelopes, but Drafts, in the other line, is the one who opens the envelopes and reads the letter. When you put something in the envelope, it is url encoded, only to be decoded when read.
But why? Well, try sending a letter without an envelope. What if it is your book manuscript? All those paper sheets, arriving upside-down at their destination. We pack things because we want to control how things arrive and Drafts also want us to pack because it smooths its work. The union is so rough that if you don’t send your letters within an envelope they won’t even arrive at their destinations.
A URL must be a full string without any white space, that’s why your regular spaces are converted to %20
and your line breaks to %0A
. Also, some character have a function in the URL, such as the ampersand (&), which states that we’re creating another FIELD
.
Let’s pretend that is the full action we’re triggering, which is going to call GoodTask and specify the FIELDS
text and dueDate. GoodTask will open the letters and place the contents in their respective fields.
Wrapping up, you url encode your QUERIES
because they must arrive safely to their destination, where they’re decoded, just as opening a letter.
The x-success envelope
The core of the x-callback-url is a FIELD
called x-success
, which sets a url for the destination app to call after it processes the QUERIES
you sent. If that’s confusing you, think of envelopes: the x-success
envelope is a business reply mail, so when the receiver attends to all the QUERIES
, it will trigger the x-success
, just as if posting the reply mail in the post office.
This is where the inception begins since we must send our x-success
as a QUERY
, thus it must be in an envelope (URL encoded) to be properly read by the next recipient. The URL in the x-success
will have its own CALL
, FIELDS
and QUERIES
, but as disguising it as an unique QUERY
in our letter and since every QUERY
must be encoded, our cloaked QUERY
must be in an envelope for itself, that’s why we encode it twice.
When we trigger the URL above, GoodTask will decode the x-success
envelope and act on its content, calling Drafts to create a new document written Hello World.
Understanding unique app markups
Drafts has a myriad of templates and tags to manipulate the current document2 and generate new text3. Launch Center Pro has many different prompts for content input, lists for selection and more. TextTool supports the [[output]]
keyword to attach the transformed text into the x-success
, much alike Terminology and the [[term]]
parameter to add a selected word into the callback action.4
I want you to create a new action in Launch Center Pro with the following url:
drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=[prompt:Hello World]
Now I want you to call this action and write Hello World in the prompt. Trigger and you’re at Drafts, with Hello World written in the document. You remember this outcome from our first actions, when we had to manually encode the space between the words, this may give you a hint on how these attributes work: They put your content in the envelope for you.
Some of these apps even offer you a syntax to URL encode whatever is within it. For example, get back to our first Hello World action in Drafts and wrap the QUERY
in double curly brackets:
drafts://x-callback-url/create?text={{Hello%20World}}
Trigger it and you’ll get a Hello%20World in the screen, so if you don’t want to read the double curly brackets as a force encoding, you can picture it as a safeguard for your QUERY
that will preserve its current state when it arrive to its destination. An invisible envelope, some may tell you.
It is also important to point out how these apps register this force encoding, they’ll often resolve every other variable, such as [prompt]
in Launch Center Pro, before encoding anything. Also, in most apps you can’t nest multiple forced encodings, however, I believe this landscape is about to change.
-
This letter will magically arrive at Drafts’ crib as soon as it picks up the phone. ↩
-
[[draft]]
for the whole document,[[title]]
for the first line and[[body]]
for all lines but the first one are good examples of document tagging in Drafts. ↩ -
[[clipboard]]
grabs the current clipboard,[[date]]
and[[time]]
include timestamps; for example. ↩ -
Other apps with their own custom parameters include 1Writer, CloudDrop, TaskAgent and others. ↩