What is the difference between a Weblink and a Symlink

What is the difference between a Weblink and a Symlink?

As I am starting to play with the recent alpha build, I am seeing them in the top navigation, and both looks equal in terms to visual data entry form. So whats the difference?

I think a Weblink links to the specified page and a Symlink will pull the content like it is the document

So weblink will do this: http://domain.ext/weblink.html goes to http://domain.ext/linkeddocument.html
And a Symlink will pull the content from http://domain.ext/linkeddocument.html and shows it on http://domain.ext/symlink.html

Don’t know for sure, but that’s the way a symlink works on linux.

And that’s the way it works in Revo. Weblinks redirect to another page or site. Symlinks only work for internal pages, and "pull the content in" maintaining your position in the navigation heirarchy. Combined with some of the parameters that can be passed in with Revo you can do some interesting things like dynamically changing the title displayed on the page or the subject field on a form.

I’ve created a symlink in my revo test installation, in the ’SymLink’ field I’ve put the document id of the document I want to symlink to. This works OK for content but it doesn’t use the template I’ve specified for the symlink resource, ie it uses the template of the document I’ve symlinked to.
Is this correct operation or do I need to do something else?

That’s the expected behavior. Behind the scenes, weblinks HTTP redirect, symlinks forward.

Quote from: shamblett at Dec 16, 2008, 08:19 AM

This works OK for content but it doesn’t use the template I’ve specified for the symlink resource, ie it uses the template of the document I’ve symlinked to.
Is this correct operation or do I need to do something else?

That is intended behavior -- the template of the symlink is meaningless other than for relating template variables to that symlink for identification/menuing purposes.

Very helpful, thanks for the explanations guys

I have to confess that I’ve never used (or needed) either one and from the discussion above, I assumed that they could be embedded in a page and would provide a link to or pull content from another page.

After experimenting, it looks like I had them all wrong. Am I correct in assuming that they are only for use as pseudo-documents that Wayfinder and other menu snippets can use to produce menu items?

Do they have any other uses?

That’s pretty much it indeed Bob. Or you could use them as a shortcut link to other sites, like the wiki or JIRA on the MODx site.

Quote from: rthrash at Feb 24, 2009, 11:44 PM

That’s pretty much it indeed Bob. Or you could use them as a shortcut link to other sites, like the wiki or JIRA on the MODx site.

Can a Weblink be embedded in a document’s content to provide a link to a page at another site? I tried putting [[~21]] on a page (where 21 was the ID of the Weblink) but all I got was ?id=21 in the rendered page.