Component link in rich text field is stripped when rendered in view

Question

I'm using DD4T 2 (.NET) with our web app. In SDL Web 8.5, I've got a Component with a rich text field. I add a hyperlink as a Component, using a standard External Link Component and this renders:

<a href="tcm:13-396" target="_blank">sample text</a>

This is expected. I publish the Page and verified that the broker database has the published Page content including the markup shown above.

In the web app, I used DD4T's GetPage(pageId) method to get the Page content and I verify that the Component Presentation still has the markup as expected.

The model:

[ContentModel("general_content", true)]
public class GeneralContent : ViewModelBase
{
    [RichTextField(FieldName = "body_text")]
    public MvcHtmlString BodyText { get; set; }
}

The ComponentPresentationController's action method:

public ActionResult GeneralContent(IComponentPresentation componentPresentation)
{
    var model = ViewModelFactory.BuildViewModel<GeneralContent>(componentPresentation);
    return View(model);
}

Once the Component Presentation is passed to the action method, if I check the model's BodyText property, it seem to have stripped the anchor markup. Just a plain text "... sample text" instead of "... <a href="http://google.co.uk" target="_blank">sample text</a>".

What I've tried:

• Replaced the external link Component in the rich text field with a basic hyperlink and this link renders as expected.
• Verify that the TCM URI returns the correct Component
• Increase link level to 3
• Verify that markup is included in broker db
• Verify that markup is retrieved from broker db
• Had a look at the RichTextField attribute from DD4T.MVC and the DefaultRichTextResolver.cs from DD4T.Core to provide a clue as to why

Is there anything else that I may be missing? Any assistance would be much appreciated.

Update

To clarify, the "External Link Component" I mentioned meant that I created a Component using a schema I created called "External Link".

The two levels I mentioned meant that Component A was linked to Component B and Component B was added to a Page and published. I was attempting to resolve Component A which wasn't on a Page.

Answer 1

The root cause was that the Component that I was intending to resolve wasn't on a published Page.

My approach was wrong. I've stopped using the External Link Component and simply used the plain hyperlink text and that worked as expected.