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Branch Universal Objects

This is the BranchUniversalObject (or BUO for short). Think of it like an empty box.

The BUO is used to tell Branch about a piece of content within your application, whether it’s a pair of shoes for sale, a hotel room in Prague, a recipe for veal picatta, or tonight’s Earthquakes game. Branch uses the BUO to send data from one user who wants to share a piece of content within your app to another users who wants to view it.

Create BranchUniversalObject​

The Branch Universal Object encapsulates the thing you want to share (content or user). You create an instance of a BranchUniversalObject by calling the createUniversalObject() function. At a minimum it should have a unique identifier and a title:

var buo:BranchUniversalObject = Branch.instance.createUniversalObject()
        .setCanonicalIdentifier( "content/12345" )
        .setTitle( "My Content Title" )
;

There are many other common properties and extended metadata that you can set on this object:

var buo:BranchUniversalObject = Branch.instance.createUniversalObject()
        .setCanonicalIdentifier( "content/12345" )
        .setTitle( "My Content Title" )
        .setContentDescription( "My Content Description")
        .setContentImageUrl("https://lorempixel.com/400/400")
        .setContentIndexingMode("public")
        .setLocalIndexMode("public")
        .setContentMetadata( new ContentMetadata()
            .addCustomMetadata("key1", "value1" )
        )
;

Properties​

There are a series of properties that you can set on a BUO within your app integration. You can see them all listed in the Branch documatation:

Once you have created the BUO identifying your content, you can generate a link to the content using the generateShortUrl() function. This function can take a series of link properties defined in a LinkProperties instance passed to the generateShortUrl() function.

When complete the function will execute the callback function passed as the second parameter to the generateShortUrl() with 2 parameters, the first is the url representing the generated link and the second is an error (BranchError) and will be null if no error occurred.

var properties:LinkProperties = new LinkProperties()
        .setChannel( "facebook" )
        .setFeature( "sharing" )
        .setCampaign( "content 123 launch" )
        .setStage( "new user" )
        .addControlParameter( "$desktop_url", "http://example.com/home" )
        .addControlParameter( "custom", "data" )
;

buo.generateShortUrl(
        properties,
        function ( url:String, error:BranchError ):void 
        {
            trace( "short url: " + url );
        }
);