Announcement strips domain name from link

Question

This is a weird one.

So I post an announcement in an announcements list. In the message body I create a link that points to a document library and am sure to include the domain name in the link.

There is a workflow attached to the list that will send the message as an email. But when it is sent out via email, the domain name is stripped from the link url and so it becomes a broken link!

I went into the message of the announcement afterwards and went to edit the link and, lo and behold! There was no domain name in the url! Even though I did use one originally.

I tried the same thing in an Announcement list without any workflow attached and found the same issue.

Anyone have a clue why this is happening? Is there a way to prevent this from happening? Maybe a setting somewhere?

Does anyone have a solution for this behaviour?

Answer 1

Here's an example of using a 2013 workflow step to read the Announcment body into a variable called Body, use a "Replace Substring In String" action to replace the text 'href="/' with 'href="http://urltosp/' and then output the updated text to the variable.

You can then send the variable contents in your email.

Answer 2

This behavior seems to be by design, it's supposed to work with alternate access mappings, but emails are clearly not considered. There's a function in SharePoint Rich Text Editor JavaScript that strips the domain, so if you switch to plain text, your HTML source will not be modified.

See this Q&A as well Absolute URLs converted to Relative URLs when saving item

Below is an excerpt from the out-of-the-box SharePoint javascript, for illustration purpose only. Not to be used as a solution.

RTE.RteUtility.$EI = function (a) {
    ULSNVe:
    ;
    var b = new RegExp("[^:]*://" + window.location.hostname + "(:|/)", "i"), c     = new RegExp("[^:]*://", "i");
    return a.search(c) === -1 || a.search(b) !== -1;
};

RTE.RteUtility.$4O = function (e) {
ULSNVe:
    ;
    var a = e, d = window.location.protocol, b = d + "//" +
        window.location.hostname, c = window.location.port;
    if (c === "")
        if (d === "https:")
            c = 443;
        else
            c = 80;
    if (c === 80 && d === "http:" || c === 443 && d === "https:")
        if (a === b)
            return "/";
        else if (!a.indexOf(b + "/"))
            return a.replace(b + "/", "/");
    b += ":" + c;
    if (a === b)
        return "/";
    else if (!a.indexOf(b + "/"))
        return a.replace(b + "/", "/");
    return a;
};