I'd like to create a web link between mashapps, e.g. user clicks ont he link and is taken to teh other mash app.
How is this possible? Do I have to specify the autogenerated link that gets created when sharing an app, in which case woudl the link become redundant? This might not be too bad within a single environment, but when I am developing locally and exporting to a live site I would prefer to specify relative URLs and not have to hard code the locally generated link
This is perfectly possible and - in fact - you went half of the way already. Each MashApp can be addressed by an URL. Grab the URL and configure some options by invoking the Link to MashApp option when viewing the MashApp to link to.
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For instance:
http://gallery.mashzone.com/mashzone/guest/app/Viewer.html?module=viewer&guid=9c303861-6010-40ea-9e70-0916bae4fab3
Inspecting the URL syntax carefully we find out:
To support staging scenarios where you develop a MashApp on one machine but run it on another one the id representing a MashApp is stable. Its constant even after export/import. The GUID is generated when a new MashApp is created or an existing one is copied using the Save As... option.
After having the link to the MashApp we need to make it available to MashZone users. Therefore several widgets are able to carry hyperlinks.
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As you can see in the screenshot above each hyperlink might refer to a tab within the current MashApp, to an external URL or it might act as a set-selection-in-a-chart-event. When specifying the URL we might specify it at once or even compose it from several fragments. This enables you to read the first part, referring to either test or production MashZone servers, from another source, e.g. read it from a data feed. A similar idea has been discussed here.