How to use internal links with wildcard items in Sitecore?

Question

I have a multiple site Sitecore solution. All the sites share a product range which is stored inside a 'Shared data' node that sits at the same level as the root nodes of the sites. The individual product pages on a site use a wildcard item to lookup the product based on the last part of the URL.

This means that we can't use internal links in the rich text editor to point to the product page on any of the sites because the product item does not have a specific site URL.

Does anyone know of a way to overcome this, or perhaps know of a way to augment the default behavior of interal links?

Tomtit

Answer 1

Have you considered using cloned items, see here for details.

This would allow you to share the content whilst having the appearance to the end user of the Products being inside the content tree allowing you to use the RTE and internal link look ups?

For extra information about clones, see here and here

You'd also need to do some work in the link provider to link to the cloned version of a product if you wanted. See this question.

Kiernan

If the existing sites and structure weren't already in place and live then I definitely would have used clone items as you suggest (and will do in future). In the end though, I actually just customized the LinkProvider, adapted from this blog sitecore.net/Community/Technical-Blogs/John-West-Sitecore-Blog/… – Tomtit