Adding anchors to links in DWT

Question

How do we add anchor links in Tridion DWT? We have a scenario where we have about 10 "teaser" type components on a page that should link to the relevant "full content" on another page.

Using:

<a tridion:href="@@Component.ID@@#@@Component.title@@">blah</a>

Breaks the link resolver, which is understandable I guess. However I can't for the life of me figure out how to get this out nicely. I did using the componentLink as below:

<tridion:ComponentLink pageURI="@@PageID@@" componentURI="@@Component.ID@@" 
    templateURI="@@GetTcmFromWebDav('/path/to/template')@@" linkAttributes="" 
    linkText="Test Link" textOnFail="true" addAnchor="true" />

which adds #1, #2, #3 to the link. Unfortunately #1, #2 and #3 doesn't seem to have any bearing on where the component is on the target page. I can add attributes that I could then later process with Javascript, but that seemed rather inelegant.

I realise I'm probably missing something obvious here.

Answer 1

You are doing the correct thing by adding addAnchor="true" if you want to link to a specific ComponentPresentation on the target Page. You can achieve this by adding tridion:anchor="true" to your anchor in your DWT.

I am not sure why you think that the #1, #2 or #3 are wrong. These are links to the OrdinalPosition of the target Component on the Page.

To make use of these anchors, you will need to add the <a name="3">Some Text</a> style name attributes to the output of your target CPs. Unfortunately OrdinalPosition is NOT available for non-VBScript templates, so you will need to use context variables to pass it from modular PTs to the Modular CTs as shown in the linked example above.

Answer 2

To my knowledge the Tridion provided custom controls don't support either custom anchors or query string elements for component links; you will either have to resort to using inline code to resolve component links (and add the anchor/query string there) or create your own custom controls for link resolving (which can optionally extend Tridion's; all you really want to do is split off the query string or anchor before the link is resolved and add it back on afterwards).

Note that for just linking to the target page you don't need any anchors of course and if you want to link to a specific location on a page the corresponding component presentation will have to write out the anchor itself (this is also not something Tridion will automatically do for you).

Answer 3

The documentation (requires login) describes you can use the tridion:anchor attribute in your DWT Template Building Block:

<a tridion:href="@@Component.ID@@" tridion:anchor="true">blah</a>

This will output an anchor reference to your link, for Component links it will use the index (or ordinal position) of the Component on the Page you are linking to.

I think there also was a way of getting the anchor tags added to a Component Presentation but I can't seem to find out how. So simplest way of achieving that would be using this in your Page Template DWT:

<!-- TemplateBeginRepeat name="Components" -->
    <a name="@@TemplateRepeatIndex + 1@@"></a>
    @@RenderComponentPresentation()@@
<!-- TemplateEndRepeat -->

Update

Following HTML5 rules, you can actually also use any id attribute with your ordinal position, and anchors will use that similar to the name attribute of an anchor link.

So this means you could update your Page Template to look like this:

<!-- TemplateBeginRepeat name="Components" -->
    <div id="@@GetOrdinalPosition(Component.ID, ComponentTemplate.ID)@@">
        @@RenderComponentPresentation()@@
    </div>
<!-- TemplateEndRepeat -->

Now to make it work for multiple regions, I didn't use TemplateRepeatIndex + 1 here anymore, but used a Custom Function (requires login) which gets the actual ordinal position of the Component Presentation on the Page. The code for this function would be something like this:

[TemplateCallable]
public int GetOrdinalPosition(string componentUri, string componentTemplateUri)
{
    try
    {
        // assume we are used on a Page Template
        Page page = (Page)_engine.PublishingContext.ResolvedItem.Item;

        // build a Component Presentation, so we can compare that with the CPs on the Page
        Component component = (Component)_engine.GetObject(componentUri);
        ComponentTemplate componentTemplate = (ComponentTemplate)_engine.GetObject(componentTemplateUri);
        var cp = new Tridion.ContentManager.CommunicationManagement.ComponentPresentation(component, componentTemplate);

        // determine ordinal position of the given Component URI and Template URI on this Page
        return page.ComponentPresentations.IndexOf(cp) + 1;
    }
    catch
    {
        return 0;
    }
}

Answer 4

Given that an or an id attribute should be unique on the page and that it isn't possible to include an anchor prefix I would suggest that you create your own convention (e.g. [prefix]_[component_template_item_id]_[component_item_id]) and use extended dynamic link resolving to append the anchor conditionally when you require it.

If using static publishing you would want to intercept links within a TBB to append the convention based anchor but the same logic can be applied at publish time or runtime.