Organizing links

Learn how to associate links with users, campaigns, teams, and other entities within your system.

When creating links programmatically with Dub, you might want a way to associate them with a user or other identifiers in your system.

There are a few ways to do this, depending on your data structure:

Method	Type	Description	Use case
External ID	One-to-one	A unique identifier for a link within your system.	Associating referral links with users in your system.
Tenant ID	One-to-many	The ID of the tenant that created the link.	Grouping all links created by a user/team in your system.
Tags	Many-to-many	Grouping links by tags	Organizing links by campaign / user / various for flexible, multi-dimensional filtering and reporting

External ID

In certain scenarios, it is essential to identify links within your system. For instance, you may need to associate a link with a user without storing the Dub link ID directly in your database (e.g. for referral links).

The externalId field serves this purpose effectively. It acts as a unique identifier within your database, allowing you to associate it with a corresponding link in Dub’s system.

Dub allows you to create links using an externalId and subsequently retrieve them by the same identifier.

externalId should be a unique value across your workspace. Trying to create a link with an externalId that already exists will result in a 409 conflict error error.

Create link with an externalId

Here is an example of how to create a link with an externalId:

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const link = await dub.links.create({
  url: "https://google.com",
  externalId: "12345",
});

Retrieve link by externalId

Let’s see how to retrieve a link by its externalId:

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const link = await dub.links.get({
  externalId: "12345",
});

Update link by externalId

In addition to updating a link by its linkId, you can also update a link by its externalId.

Make sure to prefix the externalId with ext_. For example, if your externalId is 12345, you should pass ext_12345.

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const link = await dub.links.update("ext_12345", {
  url: "https://www.google.uk", // new URL
});

Retrieve analytics by externalId

You can also retrieve analytics for a link by its externalId. This is helpful for fetching the analytics for a given link using the unique identifier from your system.

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const analytics = await dub.analytics.retrieve({
  externalId: "ext_12345",
});

Tenant ID

The ID of the tenant that created the link inside your system. If set, it can be used to fetch all links for a tenant. This is useful if you have a system that lets your users create their own links, and you want to group them on a tenant level.

Create link with tenantId

Let’s see how to create a link with a tenant ID:

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const link = await dub.links.create({
  url: "https://google.com",
  tenantId: "12345",
});

Retrieve links by tenantId

Here is how to retrieve links by tenant ID:

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const result = await dub.links.list({
  tenantId: "12345",
});

Retrieve analytics by tenantId

You can retrieve analytics by tenantId by passing the tenantId prop. This is helpful for fetching the analytics for all the links under a specific tenant, or the total analytics for a tenant.

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const analytics = await dub.analytics.retrieve({
  tenantId: "12345",
});

---

Tags

Tags are a great way to organize your links on Dub.

With tags, you can:

• Organize your links by campaigns, clients, or any other categories you can think of.
• Filter your links by tags and get a shareable link to the filtered results.
• Filter your analytics by tags to see how your campaigns are performing.

Create link with tags

You can use either pass the tag ID or tag name to create a link with tags.

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const link = await dub.links.create({
  url: "https://example.com",
  tagIds: ["clux0rgak00011..."],
});

Retrieve links by tags

You can retrieve links by tag by tags.

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const result = await dub.links.list({
  tagNames: ["tag1"],
});

Retrieve analytics by tags

You can retrieve analytics for a tag (or multiple tags) by passing the tagIds prop. This is helpful for fetching the analytics for all the links under a specific tag, or the total analytics for a tag (or multiple tags).

Node.js

import { Dub } from "dub";

export const dub = new Dub({
  token: process.env.DUB_API_KEY,
});

const analytics = await dub.analytics.retrieve({
  tagIds: ["tag_xxx"],
});