Workflow: Link in email causes weird behavior (e.g. “URL, URL”)

Question

so my set up is an approval workflow onto a list. There is a column in the list that is a preview URL. I want to link users to it in the approval email. The problem is when I create a hyperlink in sharepoint designer it adds a comma and points to the following URL:

PreviewURL, PreviewURL

What is causing this and how do I make sharepoint designer point only to PreviewURL without that added stuff?

Answer 1

Internally when you create a list item with a field of type hyperlink, it stores the url and the description together, comma delimited. So if you try to just insert the field value into the email body, that is what you'll get.

I believe the course of action here is to store the field in a variable, and when you set the variable, you tell it to return the value as a URL and you just get the URL.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sharepointdesigner/archive/2012/02/10/understanding-workflow-starting-parameters-part-2.aspx