Update Sitecore rendered links for a specific page

Question

We are using Sitecore 9.0.2 & SXA 1.7.1 and we need to update all links to be absolute only in a specific page as by default all the links are relative for example this is the default link

<a title="xyz" href="about/index.html">sometext </a>

We want the link to appear like this

<a title="xyz" href="https://domainname/about/index.html">sometext</a>

We can't do includeserverURL to true as this will affect the entire system.

Is there a pipeline that can be overridden to update links to be absolute for a specific page?

Answer 1

The reason to do this still feels rather strange, but if you want to accomplish this there are solutions.

To change the way urls are generated, you need to use a custom LinkProvider. You can create this and define them per site in SXA: https://doc.sitecore.com/developers/sxa/17/sitecore-experience-accelerator/en/add-and-select-a-custom-link-provider.html

In your case you could create a linkprovider that sets the link options to include the domain on certain conditions (alwaysIncludeServerUrl = true). Make sure to fallback to the defaults asap - if this code is not performing well your whole site will suffer.

The condition in the linkprovider could be your page but that might be a rather hardcoded solution. You could also consider using a different device for the external sites that fetch your data and test on that in the linkprovider.