Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Emailed HTML Rich Text Column Relative URLs

Scenario
  • You have a list with a multi line text column with Enhanced Rich Text.
  • The item contains links from the current server.
  • You are emailing the contents of that column via SharePoint Designer 2007 Workflows
Issue
  • The hyperlinks in the email do not work.
  • The server name was automatically stripped from the URL, making a relative path.
Resolution
  • Workaround:
    • Add the following note to the field description notifying users of the problem and the workaround.
      • "Use http://TinyUrl.com for hyperlinks and images on this site.  This will prevent emailed relative links."
    • This works because SharePoint only strips URLs it recognizes as local URLs
      • These are usually defined in the Alternate Access Mappings
    • You can use any URL redirector
  • Fixes:
    • Use Visual Studio Workflows and replace the Relative URLs with Absolute URLs
    • Intercept the outbound emails (on the SharePoint or Email servers) and replace
    • Use a custom Workflow Action that prepends the servername into the URLs
    • Use a different field type.  Try different custom Rich Text editor columns.

1 comment:

  1. One way around this that I just found is that if you paste the URL and then press backspace at the end and let it clear the hyperlink, the email will still have the Link but it will be full absolute path

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