SharePoint - Direct/Relative Links in Extranet vs. Intranet Issue

Asked By Gluec

17-Aug-07 07:56 PM

I've been fighting this problem for awhile now and have got to be missing
something.

My setup is this I have a single MOSS 2007 server running our Intranet
(http://sharepoint) and our Extranet (http://sharepoint.hcss.com.   I have
setup the alternate acess mappings.   I can access both the Intranet &
Extranet just fine.  The issue I have is with direct links to the Intranet
address won't work if accessing it from the Extranet.   I can work around
this by manually editing the links to be relative links and I have done this
for the most part.

Certain templates like the Knowledge Base have these common actions links in
the Quick Launch bar which are required to be direct links. If I edit the
links to be relative, the page won't load correctly (weird I know).   Also,
the rich text editor in a content web part automatically makes direct links
to images when inserting them.   I can edit these fine in the HTML editor but
its a real hassle everytime someone updates a section because it then
recreates the links into direct links.  MySites also have some issues with
creating direct links to certain things.

Is there something I am missing in the configuration or is this just one of
the many quirks of SharePoint that I have to live with?

Any help is appreciated!  Thanks

18-Aug-07 02:54 AM

How exactly have you setup your AAM?

With default set to http://sharepoint and any of the other settings (say
Extranet) set to http://sharepoint.hcss.com, every time you use
http://sharepoint.hcss.com to access your site, it should be accessing
all links in the site (which are naturally of the form //sharepoint
only) correctly.



Mike Walsh
WSS FAQ http://www.wssfaq.com
no questions by e-mail please

18-Aug-07 03:12 AM

Thanks for the reply Mike.

http://sharepoint set as default zone
http://sharepoint.hcss.com is set to the extranet zone
I do not have anything set for intranet or internet zones.

I hope this is what you are asking me for.   Thanks again for your help.

18-Aug-07 03:19 AM

That's what I was asking.

I haven't experienced anything like this once I'd set up AAM correctly -
I had problems with direct links before AAM was right but not since.

(and your definition looks fine to me)

Sorry to be no more help.

Mike Walsh

18-Aug-07 03:36 AM

For the most part the menu and quick link bars work fine.  The main issue I
have is with the content editor web part's Rich Text Editor.   If a
contributor inserts an image while logged on to the intranet it direct links
to http://sharepoint/sitecollectionimages/whatever.jpg  then if the user logs
into http://sharepoint.hcss.com they see a broken link.      If I edit the
HTML source in that same web part and remove the server name it works fine,
but that is extremely cumbersome.

I could live with the other quirky links as there is other ways to use the
common actions by going to the list directly and click new or upload.

I'm just wondering if this is a bug or something I've done wrong in the
setup.  If you have time could you test it with the content editor web part?

18-Aug-07 08:14 AM

Yes. I can see the same thing. (With in my case a <A etc. link to a List
in the site)

The HMTL written in a Content Editor web part is not regarded as a part
of the SharePoint system and therefore AAM doesn't apply to it. That
would be my guess as to why this (isn't / is) happening.

You can clear it though no doubt by adding the servername to your Hosts
file as then the link will find the server.

Mike Walsh

18-Aug-07 12:54 PM

Thanks for checking on that Mike.   At least I'm not going crazy over here.

I have done that on my machine's Hosts file and that works if the user uses
the same computer when accessing it via the extranet.   I was just hoping for
something I could do server-side so that it would fix it for every user in
the company no matter what computer they are using.  Oh well, I guess its
just another one of those things I have to live with.

I've thought of using Javascript that will detect what incoming IP the user
is coming from and add the servername based on that but I don't know how that
will work with automatically generated HTML by the text editor.

19-Aug-07 01:04 PM

I think I found the easiest way is to use a version of ISA which includes
link translation.   I will have to get a copy from our MSDN library and test
with it.   I hope its fairly easy to use!