Resolving the url of dynamic links

July 02, 2009 Digital Experience
As most of you have noticed, in Sitefinity 3.6 we introduced a new way of handling links to content items, images, documents and pages. By implementing the dynamic content links, you can now move pages around the sitemap and rename libraries, and the links to such items will not be broken.

Each time you insert a link through the LinkManager and Images/Document manager, a link in the following format is being produced:

[ProviderName]GUID_of_content item

Here are some examples:

  • [Sitefinity]fc6427d9-a514-4818-ba4d-5b0595989898 - a link to cms page
  • [Blogs_Libraries]b515d826-5ba6-4d2e-b638-13ae1b93b3c9 - a link to a library item
Later on, Sitefinity parses these links and forms the real paths to the items.

 

Sometimes you need to parse such "links" in your custom controls or modules, right? In such cases, you might use this code:

public string GetItemUrl(string provider, Guid id, bool resolveAsAbsoluteUrl) 
    if (ContentManager.Providers.ContainsKey(provider)) 
    { 
        IContent cnt = ContentManager.Providers[provider].GetContent(id); 
        if (cnt != null
            return VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute(cnt.UrlWithExtension, this.Context.Request.ApplicationPath); 
    } 
    else 
    { 
        // we assume it is a page 
        SiteMapNode node = SiteMap.Provider.FindSiteMapNodeFromKey(id.ToString()); 
        if (node != null
            return this.ResolveClientUrl(node.Url); 
    } 
    return String.Concat("Item not found: [", provider, "]", id); 

You can as well use the different Manager classes depending on the provider that is defined in the link, or even use the ContentManager class initialized with different provider.

I hope you will find that code helpful.

The Progress Team