Obtaining the URL for a Particular Page in DotNetNuke 7

Question

I have created a page in DNN 7 and added the standard feedback module available at Codeplex to it. Now I want to link to this page using a hyperlink in the middle of another page (not from a menu).

I am able to see the URL for the feedback page via the admin pages and it seems to be consistent. So the obvious way would be to use the HTML module and simply hardcode the URL. But something feels wrong about that. I thought of creating a simple module, encapsulate the hyperlink and surrounding text in a control and use NavigateURL to obtain the URL for the feedback page. Unfortunately, I have not been able to figure out how to do that. I have seen a lot of information about getting the URL for other controls within the same module and even using ModuleID but nothing that would help me implement the code for getting the URL for a particular page at my level of experience.

Sorry about the long intro but I was wondering if it is good practice to hardcode the URL and if not how to programmatically obtain the URL for the feedback page. TIA

Answer 1

The first argument to NavigateURL is TabId (pages are called tabs in the DNN API). To get the ID of the Feedback tab/page, you'll want to call a method off of the DotNetNuke.Entities.Tabs.TabController class; I'd suggest the static method TabController.GetTabByTabPath(portalId, tabPath, cultureCode), so something like this:

Globals.NavigateURL(TabController.GetTabByTabPath(this.PortalId, "//Feedback", string.Empty))

You're still hard-coding the path to the page here; you could have a setting, which would let you pick the page, but that seems like a bit of overkill for a simple link. The main benefit that you would get by hard-coding the path, but still using NavigateURL is that any changes you make to how URLs are generated (e.g. upgrading to the Advanced URL Provider that comes in DNN 7.1) will happen automatically.

Most folks don't worry much about programatically generating links in HTML content.