WCAG 2.0 Compliance Suggestion

It's almost there now Dave. An article numbere 30 and titled "Get ready for winter! Do you know how, or why?" should reduce to a url like:
page.php?get ready for winter do you know how or why-30

Automating the _link is a good step. But being able to match it when manually creating links would keep the URLs consistent throughout the site. That consistency is a bonus for those clients who need to manage their Google Analytics accounts.

J.

Hi Jayme,

Ok, I'm trying to re-create the scenario. I created a test record with this title:
"Get ready for winter! Do you know how, or why?!"

That generated a link like this:
listingsDetail.php?Get-ready-for-winter-Do-you-know-how-or-why-6

It looks like it already strips out ? and !. Am I looking at the right thing?

One thing you can do is create a field for "searchUrlText" and then set (Admin > Section Editors > Viewer URLs > Filename fields) to "searchUrlText, title" and then it will use the first field that isn't blank. This allows you to control through the CMS what is shown in the link.

Otherwise, let me know some more details on how you'd like it to work and I'll try and help.

That's a very good and useful suggestion Dave. Thanks for that!

I guess what I'd like to do for my retrofit sites is to have a function that processes the title field contents (or another string) to mimic the way that the native URL handler does.

We often can't use the _link as we need to adjust the href value in some way for some purpose. These might be for certain kinds of Analytics tracking, or maybe we just have several tables of data consolidated into one viewer and we need to send users to different landing pages depending on the link they are clicking on. In those cases, we build our our link href to be like:

href=destinationPage1.php?ArbitrarySectionNameOrID-ArticleTitle(fromRecord)-RecordNum

If would be nice to use pre-built tools to format ArticleTitle(fromRecord) so that the behaviour is consistent with the anchors which do use _link.

Cheers,
Jayme

Hi Jayme,

There's an undocumented function in viewer-functions.php which we use for that purpose. It's called getFilenameFieldValue(). It's meant to be passed a $record and list of fields, but you can call it directly like this:

$string = 'Hello World! How are "you" doing today?';
$_link = getFilenameFieldValue(array('input' => $string), 'input');
$_link = "article-" .$_link. "123";

showme($string); // outputs: Hello World! How are "you" doing today?
showme($_link); // outputs: article-Hello-World-How-are-you-doing-today-123

Would that do what you need? Or are we getting closer? :) If that works for you we could make a wrapper function for it so it's even easier to call, such as createCustomLink($prefix, $title, $recordNum);

That's the bunny I was looking for!

A wrapper function would be great, though I appreciate seeing the component parts for the sake of understanding. It would really help out a great deal on several projects.

Thank you!

Sure, how about something like this:

//
function createCustomLink($prefix, $title, $recordNum) {
$_link = getFilenameFieldValue(array('input' => $title), 'input');
return $prefix . $_link . $recordNum;
}

$_link = createCustomLink('article-', 'Hello World! How are "you" doing today?', 123);
print $_link; // prints article-Hello-World-How-are-you-doing-today-123

Let me know how that works for you.