Links: No way to link to another page in another culture

[enkelmedia]

Which Umbraco version are you using?

17.0.2

Bug summary

Currently there is no way to pick a content node together with a specific culture.

Scenario: I have a website with culture variants in English, German, Spanish and Swedish. In the RTE, I would like to create a link from the German "About us"-page to the "Product"-page on the English website. Currently this is not possible using the out-of-the-box property editors and link pickers.

Specifics

It's possible to work around this issue by linking to the absolute URL, so it's not a blocker but it would be nice if this was supported by the CMS and if the "link storage format" had support for indicating the target culture. This would be useful in the scenario described above but also e.g. for a link picker in the UrlTracker-package.

Instead of having to invent a custom link picker and link format, I think it would be good if the CMS has a official way of supporting this.

Currently, RTE-links are stored links are stored like this:

<a target="" data-router-slot="disabled" href="/{localLink:2de43b21-b2ea-4f3b-beb2-b65feb386d90}" title="(Products)" type="document">English Product Page</a>

We could extend the format with a optional culture

href="/{localLink:2de43b21-b2ea-4f3b-beb2-b65feb386d90:sv-SE}"

or use data-attributes which would probably be less "breaking". These attributes could be stripped by the Property Value Converter before links are rendered on the frontend.

<a data-culture="sv-SE" target="" data-router-slot="disabled" href="/{localLink:2de43b21-b2ea-4f3b-beb2-b65feb386d90}" title="(Products)" type="document">English Product Page</a>

Steps to reproduce

• Setup a website with culture variants
• Try to link to specific pages in specific culture

Expected result / actual result

No response

[github-actions[bot]]

Hi there @enkelmedia!

Firstly, a big thank you for raising this issue. Every piece of feedback we receive helps us to make Umbraco better.

We really appreciate your patience while we wait for our team to have a look at this but we wanted to let you know that we see this and share with you the plan for what comes next.

• We'll assess whether this issue relates to something that has already been fixed in a later version of the release that it has been raised for.
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We wish we could work with everyone directly and assess your issue immediately but we're in the fortunate position of having lots of contributions to work with and only a few humans who are able to do it. We are making progress though and in the meantime, we will keep you in the loop and let you know when we have any questions.

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[Zeegaan]

@enkelmedia Was this something that could be done in 13 ? 🤔
Just wondering if this is a missing feature in 17, or more of a feature request 😁

[umbracocommunity]

This issue has been mentioned on Umbraco community forum. There might be relevant details there:

https://forum.umbraco.com/t/broken-url-when-inserting-a-link-to-a-text-control/6335/23

[MiguelGuedelha]

@enkelmedia Another upvote on this one, as it's a quite common pain point in client projects that use multi-language sites and want to link between languages in a given variation of a site.

Recently (coming in 17.1.0) I submitted a PR that extends RTE links for much better resolution from an Delivery API side, so if this actually goes through it would be nice to have it added to the Delivery API side as well, as a lot of builds nowadays end up being headless as opposed to just traditional MVC.

If this does get implemented, I'm guessing data-attributes would be the way to go, same as it was on my extension, as adding a brand new attribute is never really a breaking change, as opposed to the refactor of the href itself which might be.

[enkelmedia]

@Zeegaan It was never possible in v13, I did see some commented out attempts to implement it in v13s content picker (some kind if language dropdown) but it was never fully implemented - so I guess it makes it a feature request :)

I actually had the need for this kind of link on site where the full product documentation is only written in English and I needed to link from the Swedish page to the English page but it's not possible as of today (latest v17).

[enkelmedia]

@MiguelGuedelha I agree, adding a data-attribute would be a good approach that would be safe to apply without breaking old links.

[Zeegaan]

Alright I'll move this to discussion so we know it's a feature request, thanks for clarifying @enkelmedia 💪