Broken external links encoding

Question

There's an issue in our EXM when referring to external links. When we insert these links in EXM message editor:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/rock-climbing-cat_n_5380069.html?utm_hp_ref=adventure&hq_e=el&hq_m=4435336&hq_l=15&hq_v=1adccf5361

1. The delivered email then contains only <a> tag with no href.
2. Also, you get a 500 error in the message editor when trying to edit the link again and you can't edit it anymore.

There's a message in the logs I believe is related to this:

> 6688 13:22:30 ERROR Attempted to load invalid xml. Exception:
> System.Xml.XmlException Message: '=' is an unexpected token. The
> expected token is ';'. Line 1, position 94.

We found a workaround where we encode the URLs like this:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/23/rock-climbing-cat_n_5380069.html%3Futm_hp_ref%3Dadventure%26hq_e%3Del%26hq_m%3D4435336%26hq_l%3D15%26hq_v%3D1adccf5361

then it works as expected.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

This bug is referenced in the knowledge base as Reference number: 88491.

Specifically, it patches the majority of the <sitecore.experienceeditor.speak.requests> pipeline and takes care to ensure that requests to the SPEAK which are generally handled over AJAX calls are properly formatted.

It should be noted that this is an issue specifically with Sitecore Experience Editor and NOT EXM specifically. However, it's easy to blame EXM due to the tight integration that Experience Editor has inside of the Email eXperience Manager

The fix itself has been fixed in Sitecore 8.2, however EXM 3.4 (which supports Sitecore 8.2) isn't released yet of the writing of this response.

There is NOT an actual kb.sitecore.net article on this issue.