What are the best practices for Dynamic Link Resolving when using the Page-Free content approach for Tridion?

Question

This article by Will Price talks about Page-Free content in Tridion. He also talked about how links can be resolved dynamically. When more and more content types are created in Page-Free approach and if each content type has a different URL pattern, dynamic link resolving becomes complicated. Link resolving module then needs to have the knowledge about content type and URL pattern.

Publish time link resolving is not an option due to its disadvantages.

Can you suggest me the best ways to deal with dynamic linking in Page-Free content approach?

Answer 1

If you want the flexibility for each content type (=schema) to have a totally different URL pattern, then there is not much you can do about it, however, I don't see it as being very complicated to have a simple schema->url pattern configuration file - you could even publish this from the CMS.

If you can sacrifice some of this flexibility, you could take the same kind of approach that MVC.NET does with registering routes, by having parts of the url defined by the context, for example the default Route:

/{controller}/{action}/{id}

Maps to a controller, action and item id

You could have something similar mapped to tridion item types

/{schema}/{component-template}/{id}

To display an item with a certain template.