Managing Links Part 2: Unlocking the Potential

As I described in the previous post, the LinkManager8 component reads all links in any text-based content item and keeps track of links to content-managed items and can be further activated to keep track of internal website links. But the component is actually tracking all links - to external locations as well. In this post I'll unlock the Link Manager's potential as a comprehensive tool for website administrators.

The "Managed Links Search" page can find links to content, links inside content, links to internal websites, sections and web pages and will find links that are valid or invalid. But there's no option to search external links. This is an oversight - because the functionality already exists! To use it, try a blank search and then examine the URL of the results page. Find the key-value pair of LkSearchColumns (which describes where to search) and swap in dLkOriginalUrl (the column for the actual link) then add the URL to search (such as www.mysite.com), like this:
&LkSearchColumns=dLkOriginalUrl&dLkOriginalUrl=www.mysite.com

Now you can search for any external URL in your system! The search supports wildcards, use % for a string. It also works for finding Idoc code as well as relative URLs. Of course, modifying the results URL is cumbersome so you'll want to duplicate the component's template for the search form with your own component/template and update the fields.

In some scenarios the Link Manager can increase the time it takes to perform a collection rebuild. This is because it needs time to convert non-text formats in order to parse their links. It is typically ok to disable link parsing during a rebuild because the links were already parsed during checkin. Use this config setting:
LkDisableOnRebuild=true

One final note - the Link Manager stores the target of each link as a 50 character reference, which may sometimes be too short and cause problems. Extend the database table so say, 200 characters, with some SQL like this:
ALTER TABLE managedlinks MODIFY dlkresource varchar2(200);