Deep Linking

Send a user straight to a specific view inside a devframe — a particular terminal session, a particular data source — from another dock, an agent, or a copied URL. There are two paths: the hub relays a dock activation to focus a dock in place, and a standalone SPA reads its own URL hash to restore the view on load.

Focusing a dock inside a hub

The viewer's active dock is client-local state — which dock is on screen lives in the shell page, not in shared state. A mounted devframe runs in its own iframe on its own RPC client, so it reaches that selection through the hub. hub:docks:activate switches the active dock and carries an opaque params bag the target dock reads:

await rpc.call('hub:docks:activate', {
  dockId: 'devframes:plugin:data-inspector',
  params: { sourceId: 'my-plugin:store' },
})

The hub broadcasts the request live and mirrors it into the devframe:docks:active shared-state slot, so a dock that mounts because of the switch still converges on the request instead of missing the broadcast. The target dock subscribes to that slot, filters on its own dockId, and reads the params field it recognizes — see Cross-iframe dock activation for the full relay.

Focus is one-shot and tolerant: the terminals dock reads params.sessionId, the Data Inspector reads params.sourceId, and a target that names something not yet registered waits for it to appear, then fires once — the user's own clicks stay honored afterward. An id that never arrives is a no-op; a dockId the viewer doesn't know degrades to a warning (DF8107).

Standalone URL deep links

Running standalone — a CLI server, a static build — a devframe SPA owns its own URL. Encode the shareable view in the hash (#…): it round-trips through a copied link, survives a reload, and stays clear of the query string that the server handshake (?devframe_auth_token=) rides on. Parse it with URLSearchParams for a familiar key/value shape:

// read on load
const params = new URLSearchParams(location.hash.replace(/^#/, ''))
const sourceId = params.get('source')

// write back, without stacking history entries
history.replaceState(history.state, '', `#${params.toString()}`)

// react to back/forward and manual edits
window.addEventListener('hashchange', applyState)

The terminals dock keys a single selection as #id=<sessionId>; the Data Inspector encodes its whole workbench — #source=…&query=… plus filter and auto-rerun flags — so a link reproduces an exact query result. Read the hash once at boot to restore the view, then keep it in sync as the user works. replaceState writes never fire hashchange, so the boot read, the live listener, and the write-back compose without looping.

Keep credentials out of anything shareable. A pre-shared handshake token belongs in the query string and should be scrubbed from the address bar as soon as it's read, the way the Data Inspector consumes ?devframe_auth_token= — never in the hash a user copies to share a view.