Sitecore not resolving rich text editor URLS in page renders

Question

Hi

We're having issues inserting links into rich text in Sitecore 6.1.0. When a link to a sitecore item is inserted, it is outputted as:

http://domain/~/link.aspx?_id=8A035DC067A64E2CBBE2662F6DB53BC5&_z=z

Rather than the actual resolved url:

http://domain/path/to/page.aspx

This article confirms that this should be resolved in the render pipeline:

in Sitecore 6 it inserts a specially formatted link that contains the Guid of the item you want to link to, then when the item is rendered the special link is replaced with the actual link to the item

The pipeline has the method ShortenLinks added in web.config

<convertToRuntimeHtml>
    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.PrepareHtml, Sitecore.Kernel"/>
    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.ShortenLinks, Sitecore.Kernel"/>
    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.SetImageSizes, Sitecore.Kernel"/>
    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.ConvertWebControls, Sitecore.Kernel"/>
    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.FixBullets, Sitecore.Kernel"/>
    <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.ConvertToRuntimeHtml.FinalizeHtml, Sitecore.Kernel"/>
</convertToRuntimeHtml>

So I really can't see why links are still rendering in ID format rather than as full SEO-tastic urls. Anyone got any clues?

Thanks, Adam

Answer 1

This will be the default behaviour if you are using sc:fld to render field values. This is legacy behaviour left from Sitecore 5 which did not replace the guids in item links.

If you want to use Sitecore 6's new functionality, you must use sc:field instead

Answer 2

If you are dealing with a large amount of code changes to implement FieldRenderer, might be worth to consider using Sitecore.Links.LinkManager.ExpandDynamicLinks(string text, UrlOptions options). It parses links and references to media items that Rich Text field might contain.