Getting a document link in DXA?

Question

The current link (Embedded Schema) supports external link or internal link (via Component linking). For internal linking, Tridion resolves the link if the Component is published on one or more Pages.

How can this internal link field be used to resolve documents (like PDF, Excel, Word etc.) ?

Suppose we modify the 'Link' Schema to allow the 'Internal Link' field to support 'Multimedia Links'; documents will still not work, because they also need to be present on some Page.

In short, how can a link Schema be used to support document (multimedia) links?

Edit

The link can be something like it is for images for e.g: "/media/PDF-Doc_tcm4-3247_w1024_n.PDF"

I even tried creating a dynamic template and published a PDF. But the link schema is not resolving the url. Its still looking for a page base I suppose. Is there any other way I can try (apart from DXA 1.2 upgrade :) )

Answer 1

I was also facing the similar problem and resolved with the below steps:

We need to use Default Multimedia schema and Chose Multimedia type "PDF" while creating the component. Attach this multimedia component to the 'Internal Link' field of Link schema and publish the relevant page.

Once the page is published you can check and confirm the published content to broker DB via ODData service for the reference to the pdf file.

However this does not gives the path of pdf yet. Please refer to fix below.

DXA 1.2 Code fix:

We have different type of STRATEGY in which the links are resolved as Binary link, Component link , or page link in DXA.

We have implementation class TridionLinkResolver.java implements LinkResolver which has the methods #resolveLink overloaded with two and three arguments, the third argument boolean resolveToBinary is the key to resolve the links as binary.

The ComponentLinkFieldConverter.java is the class and the method createComponentLink where it invokes the TridionLinkResolver.resolveLink with two arguments method as below:

final String url = linkResolver.resolveLink(componentId, null);

it does not check STRATEGY to resolve as Binary or Component link,

Changes needed here to check for multimedia and resolve that as binary as below

 String url = "";       

        if(null != component && null != component.getComponentType() && component.getComponentType().name().equalsIgnoreCase("Multimedia")){

            url = linkResolver.resolveLink(componentId, null,true);
        }
        else{

            url = linkResolver.resolveLink(componentId, null);
        }

Answer 2

Since DXA 1.1, Component Links to Multimedia Components are resolved as Binary Links (so a direct link to the MM Component's binary content).

I see you have tagged dxa java, which means that you will need DXA 1.2 (the first official DXA Java release).