What is the difference between a Weblink and a Symlink

Quote from: OpenGeek at Sep 21, 2009, 11:39 AM

Sounds to me like you need tag-based navigation to be honest. You can use TV’s to select tags for individual documents and build navigation using that data.

I’m trying to figure out how that would work but I haven’t been successful. Here’s a short screencast illustrating the issue. Perhaps you could expound a bit on how tag based nav would work in this context.

Thanks!

-matt

I have a specific issue that requires a Symlink....

One of the pages I need to show for the site I am building gives Court information that is the same for drug users and alcohol users. It makes sense to keep one resource for both, hence the Symlink idea.

I need the page title to read "Court information for drug users" for one page and "Court information for drink drivers" for the others.

I can create the symlink but I do not believe that I the tag holding the page title changes. It seems to always return the page title from when the resource was created.

Is that supposed to be the behaviour? It would make sense to have the content locked but all other fields (including template variables) changeable. One of my template variables is called "context" and will be used to change the color of the page (yellow for drug users and red for drink driver)

Cheers

JG

http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/revolution/Using+Resource+Symlinks

I wrote this months ago. It should help....

I’m facing the same problem like mattcdavis1 does:

My site’s structure is like the following:

• Categories (1) (doc)[list]
  [li]Audio (2) (doc)[list]
  [li]Rock n Roll Spezial (7) (symlink to 5)

[/li]
[li]Video (3) (doc)[/li]
[/list][/li]
[li]Products (4) (doc)

• Rock n Roll CD (5) (doc)
• Rock n Roll DVD (6) (doc)

[/li]
[/list]

Quote from: wshawn at Jul 11, 2010, 09:55 PM

http://svn.modxcms.com/docs/display/revolution/Using+Resource+Symlinks

I wrote this months ago. It should help....

In the docs you’re writing

A MODx Revolution symlink simply takes the content of one resource and displays it in another. You can add a new template or what ever changes you may want to the symlink, and you can place it anywhere within the site, but you can not add additional content to it.

So I was expecting when clicking on the "Rock n Roll Spezial" (id 7) link in the navigation created by wayfinder I will come to /categories/audio/rock-n-roll-special.html. There [[*pagetitle]] should be "Rock n Roll Spezial" and [[*content]] should be that of Rock n Roll CD (id 5). Additonally I was expecting wayfinder to set "Rock n Roll Spezial" (id 7) as the active navigation item.

But instead of the expected behaviour I get this:

* I click on "Rock n Roll Spezial" (id 7) link in the navigation created by wayfinder
* My browser opens /audio/rock-n-roll-special.html
-> [[*pagetitle]] is "Rock n Roll CD"
-> Wayfinder marks "Rock n Roll CD" (id 5) as active in the navigation.

I think this is not the behaviour described in Using Resource Symlinks, or am I misunderstanding something?

Here is my understanding of symlinks:

While a weblink actually forwards the user to the page referred to, a symlink pulls that document into the URL of the symlink itself. In other words, when the user reaches the target page, the URL shown in the browser’s address window will be that of the symlink. One use of symlinks is to allow you to serve the same page in different parts of your menu structure without duplicating the page.
As with weblinks, the template used will be that of the target page rather than the template of the symlink.

Hey Bob!

So to me it seems the only difference between a web- and symlink is the url displayed in the browser?
But I think there should be more than this. A symlink resource should be a separate resource behaving like a normal document. The only difference to a normal document is that you can’t set the content of a symlink resource. This is because the content of a symlink resource is taken from the document it is linked to.

Just back to my example from above: I want to have my "Rock n Roll Spezial" (7) link in the navigation marked as active when a user clicked on it. Displaying the url (/audio/rock-n-roll-special.html) of "Rock n Roll Spezial" in the browser but marking Rock n Roll CD (5) as active in the navigation is no gain. For this behavior I could use a weblink as well. The only difference would be that the url is /products/rock-n-roll-cd.html

The type of header information that gets sent should be different between symlinks/weblinks. Symlinks forward whereas weblinks redirect.

FWIW, this is a requested improvement already; please see http://bugs.modx.com/browse/MODX-2395

Ok, fine!

In this post I wrote some related stuff: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,56215.0.html