Rendering Fully Qualified Sitecore URLs

Jan 6, 2012 by Mark Ursino    No Comments    Posted under: Sitecore

Sitecore’s web.config contains many ways to extend and customize the application. One such configurable aspect is dynamic link resolution. This article is intended to explain how you can configure Sitecore to render fully qualified URLs (e.g. http://host/my/path/to/page.aspx) in links.

Make All Links Fully Qualified

Its really easy to configure Sitecore to make all links fully qualified. You can simply update the linkManager configuration and set alwaysIncludeServerUrl to true. Here’s an example:

<linkManager defaultProvider="sitecore">
  <providers>
    <clear />
    <add name="sitecore" type="Sitecore.Links.LinkProvider, Sitecore.Kernel" addAspxExtension="true" alwaysIncludeServerUrl="true" encodeNames="true" languageEmbedding="never" languageLocation="filePath" shortenUrls="true" useDisplayName="false" />
  </providers>
</linkManager>

Only Make Some Links Fully Qualified

If you don’t always want all links to be fully qualified, but rather have certain scenarios when they should be, you can create a custom link provider to handle this. Simply inherit Sitecore.Links.LinkProvider and override the GetItemUrl(...) method:

namespace CustomLibrary.Links
{
    public class CustomLinkProvider : Sitecore.Links.LinkProvider
    {

        public override string GetItemUrl(Sitecore.Data.Items.Item item, Sitecore.Links.UrlOptions options)
        {

            if (/* my condition of when to apply fully qualified links, e.g. a specific device maybe */)
            {

                options.AlwaysIncludeServerUrl = true;

            }

            return base.GetItemUrl(item, options);
        }

    }
}

After doing this, change the defaultProvider in the linkManager to your custom class like so:

<linkManager defaultProvider="custom">
  <providers>
    <clear />
    <add name="sitecore" type="Sitecore.Links.LinkProvider, Sitecore.Kernel" addAspxExtension="true" alwaysIncludeServerUrl="false" encodeNames="true" languageEmbedding="never" languageLocation="filePath" shortenUrls="true" useDisplayName="false" />
    <add name="custom" type="CustomLibrary.Links.CustomLinkProvider, CustomLibrary" addAspxExtension="true" alwaysIncludeServerUrl="false" encodeNames="true" languageEmbedding="never" languageLocation="filePath" shortenUrls="true" useDisplayName="false" />
  </providers>
</linkManager>

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