Disable anchor rewriting#

Anchor links are links with a "#" in them. A frequent use-case is to use anchor links to point to different sections of the current page. For example, we might have this in our template:

<ul>
    <li><a href="#section1">Section 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#section2">Section 2</a></li>
</ul>

Things get tricky because (assuming you use <% base_tag %> in your template - see common variables) we have set our <base> tag to point to the root of the site. So, when you click the first link you will be sent to https://www.example.com/#section1 instead of https://www.example.com/my-long-page/#section1

In order to prevent this situation, the SSViewer template renderer will automatically rewrite any anchor link that doesn't specify a URL before the anchor, prefixing the URL of the current page. For our example above, the following would be created in the final HTML

<ul>
    <li><a href="my-long-page/#section1">Section 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="my-long-page/#section2">Section 2</a></li>
</ul>

There are cases where this can be unhelpful, for example when HTML anchors are created from Ajax responses, or you are using a JavaScript framework in the frontend that uses hash links as part of its functionality. In these situations, you can disable anchor link rewriting by setting the SSViewer.rewrite_hash_links configuration value to false.

# app/_config/config.yml
SilverStripe\View\SSViewer:
  rewrite_hash_links: false

Alternatively, it's possible to disable anchor link rewriting for specific controllers and routes using the SSViewer::setRewriteHashLinksDefault() method in the controller:

namespace App\PageType;

use PageController;
use SilverStripe\View\SSViewer;

class ExamplePageController extends PageController
{
    protected function init()
    {
        parent::init();
        SSViewer::setRewriteHashLinksDefault(false);
    }
}