Roku Developer Program

[georgejecook]

Deep linking is required for certification. Search integraiton is not.

We don't want to do search integration at this point.

But deep linking uses content ids from the search field.

What does this mean? Can someone please explain? How does one implement deep linking if there is no search integration?

What would our content ids contain? where would they come from?

[24i]

Hi georgejecook,

You are correct: the deep linking is a requirement and therefor needs to be implemented, regardless of search integration.
How you can do this is by the following: 
Your media items probably come from some backend, where each media item has an unique id. This id should passed inside the deeplink along with a mediatype, for example:
http://10.24.24.94:8060/launch/dev?cont ... pe=episode 

Then inside the application you should get this contentID from the args passed to the Main(args as Object) in the main.brs.
We normally pass this to our Scene by adding it the application's global field:

Sub Main (args as Dynamic)
    m.global.addField("startupArgs", "assocarray", true)
    m.global.startupArgs = args
 
    ...
End Sub

Then inside your Scene you can get the startup arguments form the global node and do something with it, like getting the meta-data for the contentID given and go to the video directly or show an episode picker depending on the mediaType. The expected behaviour can be found here: https://sdkdocs.roku.com/display/sdkdoc/Deep+Linking

For Roku's QA you will have to provide these contentID's along with the mediaTypes and they will use those for testing the deeplinking requirement.

[georgejecook]

Strange requirement;  thanks for the clarification.

[destruk]

Not too strange - with all the coverage of streaming services and hardware under attack to police pirated content, the ability for Roku to go in and view anything on any channel without needing to look for it makes perfect sense to me.  Also if you ever do want to implement global search on the Roku platform, having deep linking working will cover half of what you need already.

[genepensiero]

I've followed the Roku SDK instructions and done as much research as I can...yet when I use the Deep Link Tester it just opens the channel normally, won't play the items. 

Any ideas how I need to change my RSS files? Here's a current example of how one of my videos is listed in my RSS:


<item>
<title>Prayer Pressure</title>
<link>http://media.calvaryhanford.com/psalms/prayerpressure.mp4</link>
<description>David brings big requests to God and receives a big revelation.</description>
<pubDate>Sun, 05 Mar 2017 10:15:00 PT</pubDate>
<guid isPermaLink="false">without-ceasing-01</guid>
<media:content channels="2" type="video/mp4" isDefault="true" url="http://media.calvaryhanford.com/psalms/prayerpressure.mp4">
<media:description>David brings big requests to God and receives a big revelation.</media:description>
<media:keywords>church, bible study, expository sermon</media:keywords>
<media:thumbnail url="http://media.genepensiero.com/roku/withoutceasing.jpg" />
<media:title>Prayer Pressure</media:title>
</media:content>
</item>