Hyperlink Shenanigans

[Lohbauer]

Good Morning,

This is an interesting issue I'm having with hyperlinks. Windchill is misreading a symbol and so its pasting an errant address into the URL.

#ptc1/...

But when a small group of users click the link they get an error be cause that same link reads in the URL as:

http://.../ptc1/...

If I go back into the URL and fix the text the link works fine. Go back and edit the link, the link is correct. Somewhere in the reading of the link there is a translation going on.

Has anyone else seen this? It doesnt happen to all users. The last user i encountered was running IE10.

MSOffice 2007

WindchillAdministrator

[sm]

How are the users receiving the URL? I know this is an issue with Microsoft Lync. Lync will dynamically convert the URL using % character representations which Windchill does not recognize or use. Other then Lync, I have not had any issues sharing a Windchill URL with anyone.

-Scott

[avillanueva]

This is what I noticed from MS Lync and perhaps all MS products link email. Sorry for resurrecting old post but users hate this here. I have the following URL portion:

tcomp/infoPage?oid=VR%3Awt.doc.WTDocument%3A1185339877&u8=1

When you paste to another user in Lync, it shows exactly that but knuckhead from Redmond convert it to look like this:

tcomp/infoPage?oid=VR:wt.doc.WTDocument:1185339877%26u8=1

Notice the colons. So when you click on the link, you get a Windchill Error, contact your admins. If you copy and paste that URL as text, it works as it should. 

I opened a call with PTC but I think the solution lies with MS Lync.

[jessh]

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@avillanueva wrote:

This is what I noticed from MS Lync and perhaps all MS products link email. Sorry for resurrecting old post but users hate this here. I have the following URL portion:

tcomp/infoPage?oid=VR%3Awt.doc.WTDocument%3A1185339877&u8=1

When you paste to another user in Lync, it shows exactly that but knuckhead from Redmond convert it to look like this:

tcomp/infoPage?oid=VR:wt.doc.WTDocument:1185339877%26u8=1

Notice the colons. So when you click on the link, you get a Windchill Error, contact your admins. If you copy and paste that URL as text, it works as it should. 

I opened a call with PTC but I think the solution lies with MS Lync.

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The issue with the latter URL is not the colons -- those can be safely represented as either "%3A" or ":" in this context.  It just so happens that some URL encoding libraries, e.g. Java's, encode ":" as "%3A".

The issue here is turning & into %26.  That's just plain wrong as that changes the meaning of the URL, from having two query parameters, oid and u8, to having just one query parameter, oid, with the remainder of the query string all jammed into its value.

[BrianToussaint]

You should try Tiny URL.  https://tinyurl.com/  It will convert the URL that you give it to a new URL that is a string of characters.

[slapha]

We saw this early on after we went to 10.1 or 10.2 when they changed the URL scheme. There's a bit of a bug from Microsoft. For the most part office doesn't recogonize pound signs (#) and will often convert the URL.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/202261

"The pound sign is a valid character to use in a file name but is not accepted in hyperlinks in Office documents."

[Lohbauer]

Scott,

The users are navigating to the details page of the file in question and copying that URL. They then paste that URL into the into a piece of text as a hyperlink.

Bob Lohbauer

Jacobs Vehicle Systems

[mboremski]

Have you seen this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/202261

[mboremski]

**bleep**.. missed the already given awnsers.. sorry..