URL Hotspot Issues
Daniel Nashed – 26 January 2009 07:02:19
Before Lotusphere I blogged about DAOS infos in the Domino Wiki. One of the link was broken and I wasn't sure why. Now back from Lotusphere I took a deeper look into the problem.
I am not 100% sure in detail what is happening but the problem is more complicated than expected.
Because I had some issues with umlauts and some other details when testing the blog template I decided to switch the default encoding for my blog to UTF-8 when I launched it.
Pasting URLs into the blog text also caused some issues with formatting. So I decided to use hotspots for links in my blog.
This works fine unless you have "special" characters like "=" or blanks in the URL. In this case there are issues with converting those chars correctly.
I did some testing and found out that you have to manually convert the URL to UTF-8 via @URLEncode.
First I tried to convert it completely with a formula. But that converted the whole URL and also replaced the "http://" prefix.
This causes that the Domino server cannot figure out that it is an absolute URL and will add the server and database in front of the URL line.
I got it finally working with the following @formula
"http://www.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/"+@URLEncode("UTF-8";"search.htm?opendocument&qÚOS")
Is this working as designed or is this a bug? It looks like the server does not convert the hotspot correctly to UTF-8 without this trick and this causes issues with the link.
Maybe someone has a better idea to solve this issue? Any ideas?
Update after posting:
When posting this document I ran into another issue.
The same problem also happens when you use normal text in the richtext blog field.
The bold line above is converted in the wrong way. So it is not only an issue with URL hotspots.
It can also occur in the middle of a text. You can see behind the ...opendocument that the "&q=" is converted to odd looking characters.
If you specify the string components separately it converts correctly in the text like this.
"http://www.lotus.com/ldd/dominowiki.nsf/dx/"+@URLEncode("UTF-8";"search.htm?opendocument"+"&q="+"DAOS")
I am still trying to figure out what is happening. Does anyone have an idea how to solve this?
Why is the server converting simple text with those chars?
-- Daniel
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