Opening ulinks in the browser

[honyk]

Dear All,

in my old Oxygen 11 there are chain icons besides <ulink> elements in he Author mode. When this icon is clicked, the target HTML code is downloaded and opened in the Oxygen. Is there any way to change this behaviour to open that URL in a default web browser?

Thanks, Jan

[Radu]

Hi Jan,

I remember we changed the behavior to do exactly what you want (open links to web pages in a web browser) in oxygen 12.1.
So you should try to upgrade to a newer version of Oxygen (current version is 15.2).

Regards,
Radu

[menkalos]

I'm running Oxygen 20, and I'm seeing a related problem. If the URL ends in a filename with .html, then it opens in the browser just fine. For example, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html works fine and opens in the browser.

However, if I try to test the link https://docs.aws.amazon.com (which is 100% legit), it tries to open the link in Oxygen and errors out.

How do I configure Oxygen so ALL http: and https: links (regardless of whether they end in .html or not) open in the default browser?

Thanks much!

[sorin_carbunaru]

Hello,

I just tried your URLs on oXygen 20.0 (build 2018032903, reset global options) with the following DocBook 4 article:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN" "http://docbook.org/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">
<article>
    <title/>
    <sect1>
        <title/>
        <para><ulink url="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html"/></para>
        <para><ulink url="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/"/></para>
    </sect1>
</article>

They both behaved the same when clicking on the small anchor link in the Author page, and even when pressing Ctrl and then clicking on the URL value in the Text page.

Do you have a customized DocBook framework? Have you edited the DocBook CSS files in any way (perhaps oXygen 20\frameworks\docbook\css\links.css)?

Regards,
Sorin Carbunaru
oXygen XML

[menkalos]

We do indeed have a customized DocBook framework, but that is managed by another team. What do I need to have them look for to address this? Thank you!

[sorin_carbunaru]

Hello,

It's best to contact that team and let them know about your problem. Perhaps they can remember what they have changed.

For example, they could use the CSS Inspector View (see https://www.oxygenxml.com/doc/versions/ ... -view.html) to check if the value of the "link" or "-oxy-link" property (the URL value) is correct.

It seems however very unlikely to have changed the default behavior through a framework customization. If possible, perhaps reset you global options... I can't think of an option that could trigger your problem, but as you can see in one of my previous posts, with Oxygen 20.0 and reset options I didn't have this problem.

By the way, Oxygen 20.x is no longer supported, and officially we don't provide support for it anymore. It would be a good idea to upgrade to the latest version of Oxygen .

Regards,
Sorin Carbunaru

[menkalos]

I am running the latest version, and the problem persists. When I get a chance, I'll try saving all my options, then resetting them to see if that addresses anything.

[Radu]

Hi,

Can you also try to edit the small Docbook 4 sample Sorin posted above, click both links there and tell us where they are opened?

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN" "http://docbook.org/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">
<article>
    <title/>
    <sect1>
        <title/>
        <para><ulink url="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html"/></para>
        <para><ulink url="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/"/></para>
    </sect1>
</article>

Regards,
Radu

[menkalos]

I just tried that. I created a topic with only this content:

Code: Select all

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.5//EN" "http://docbook.org/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd">
<article>
    <title/>
    <sect1>
        <title/>
        <para><ulink url="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/index.html"/></para>
        <para><ulink url="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/"/></para>
    </sect1>
</article>

I then switched to Author mode. When I click on the first link, it correctly opened in the browser. When I click the 2nd link, it opened in a new Editor tab in Oxygen.

And now, I just tried resetting all of my global options (saved them first, of course) and sure enough, the problem disappears. So it is likely in one of our transforms. I'll bring this up with our local engineering team that provides us with the infrastructure behind Oxygen. Thank you for helping me to narrow it down!

[Radu]

Hi,

I'm not sure what that global setting would be which would cause this effect. The only one I can think of is the Preferences->"Global" settings page "Default internet browser" setting which can be changed to point to a custom browser, maybe it was changed to a custom value which pointed to Oxygen...

Regards,
Radu

[menkalos]

Global settings also include all of our custom add-ons and frameworks. One of those is likely the culprit. Our engineering team that owns and created the add-ins is investigating now.

[strohma]

Hi Radu,

I'm one of the devs that has worked on our custom frameworks that are causing this issue. I was able to narrow it down to having multiple entries for the file name association in one of our frameworks. I did further testing by removing our frameworks and modifying the DocBook4 framework to have "*,*.xml" for the file association and was able to duplicate this issue.

Thanks,

Strohm

[Radu]

Hi Strohm,

Good catch, I looked again on our side and indeed it seems that when Oxygen needs to take a decision about if the URL should be opened in the editor area or in a web browser, it also checks if one of the file patterns specified at framework level matches the URL. As "*" is an universal selector, Oxygen considers that the opened URL is some kind of XML document and decides to open it internally. Maybe instead of using the "*" selector you can add multiple individual specific selectors.

Regards,
Radu