External links with ECM?

0
votes

Sitecore 6.6.0 (rev. 130214) Email Campaign Manager 2.0.0 rev. 130123

I'm creating email messages to be sent from ECM and have been testing them by sending them to myself. What I've found is that I'm getting a 404 response when I try to add an external link. Internal (to the website) links resolve normally.

External link (to google) looks like this:

http://xxxx/sitecore/RedirectUrlPage.aspx?ec_url=http%3a%2f%2fgoogle.com&ec_camp=00000000000000000000000000000000&ec_as=00000000000000000000000000000000

Internal link (to a latest news page) looks like this:

http://xxxx/sitecore/RedirectUrlPage.aspx?ec_url=%2flatest-news&ec_camp=00000000000000000000000000000000&ec_as=00000000000000000000000000000000

Does the "RedirectUrlPage.aspx" page expect a Sitecore item?

Any other ideas as to what I'm doing wrong here in getting the external links to resolve properly?

Thanks!

3
sitecoresitecore6sitecore-ecm
Have you checked if there are any errors in the Sitecore logs? – Elena Zlateva
Thanks Elena. Yes, I've looked through the logs. Nothing strange to report. I've reached out to Sitecore support for some assistance on this. One thing I can clear up is my question about the 'redirecturlpage' expecting a Sitecore item: It shouldn't. The module should handle internal and external links with no issues. – Craig Taylor
Can you post the code/markup that you use to obtain and/or render the links? – Zachary Kniebel
Update from Sitecore support: The issue is the zeroed-out GUIDs for campaign ID and automation state. These are cleared when the 'preview' email is sent out to a single test user. Something in the module doesn't like this when trying to resolve the external links. When the actual email is dispatched, the GUIDs are replaced with 'real' values and the links work normally. (assuming the campaign has been published in a staged environment) Sitecore is continuing to look at this to see if this is something they can resolve. – Craig Taylor
Sorry to necro this old thread, but did anything come out of this? Or is it just a known issue? – Patrick Jones

3 Answers

2
votes

After sending the mail, ECM generates all external links in the newsletter itself in a multilist. I guess your working on a CM/CD environment, so you have to publish the newsletter in order to get the external links tot the web. If published, the redirecturlpage can find the external links and redirect to the specific page. We've had this issue in ECM 1.3.2 and it is recently fixed by support for us.

1
votes

That is a valid ECM behavior. If you perform test dispatch and later click on the external link in your mail, you should be logged in to Sitecore in order to get proper redirect. Otherwise you will be redirected to not found page.

The Sitecore user should be either:

  • Administrator;
  • Member of the sitecore\ECM Users or sitecore\ECM Advanced Users roles.

You can easily prove that by logging in to Sitecore before and clicking on link for one more time.

Note, that is a restriction of a test dispatch only and on real dispatch everything should work OK.

0
votes

When dispatching the mail, the automation state and the campaign are created and in the links then (ec_camp and ec_as in the query strings!). The Redirect page needs them to track behavior of the user - especially for external links, because they don't end up on your page.

The Test-Send is mainly used to check the layout...