Happy Friday!
Welcome to all my new subscribers, it’s great to have you along for the ride.
This week, I’m going to zoom in on one of the most powerful (and often underused) features in Bubble - URL Parameters.
Firstly - what is a URL Parameter?
To put it simply, it’s the bit on the end of a URL, which can contain lots of different data.
For example, if you were an eCommerce site selling paint, you might have some URL Parameters like…
- https://paintshop.com/products/gloss?color=blue
- https://paintshop.com/products/gloss?color=red&size=1Litre
- https://paintshop.com/products/gloss?utm_campaign=marketing_email
In each of the above examples, the bit in bold are the URL parameters.
As you can see, you can either have one, or multiple different parameters in a list.
You can do all sorts of things with the data in those parameters, in the above example, we would customize the product shown on the page to match what was requested in the parameter.
URL Parameters are extremely powerful in Bubble, so it’s worthwhile taking some time to understand and experiment with them.
Here’s a few examples of the things you can do using URL Parameters in Bubble.
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Power navigation in your Single Page App. I covered how to set this up in a previous issue.
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Change the state of a page. Hide or show elements based on which URL Parameters are present.
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Trigger creation of new things in your database. For example, my app sends out email surveys that use URL params to record which option the user clicked on in the email.
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Handle OAuth Authentication. If you want to integrate your own OAuth services you’ll need to use URL Params to grab codes from the browser url.
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Deep Linking. If you want to deep-link to a specific record within your app you can add the ID of the thing to the URL as a parameter.
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Recording Which Marketing Channels are working. Utilizing UTM Parameters can help you track where your users are signing up from.
As you can see they’re extremely versatile and an essential part of your toolkit for building a SaaS in Bubble.
Let’s look at some of the basic fundamentals of how to use them, then some specific use cases in more detail.