Pager links broken?

[LxLasso]

We're on DNN 09.13.09 and recently upgraded from 6.6.0 (!) to Community Forums 9.0.1.

I thought I had done a proper job of testing, but missed one thing, the pagers in the topics and topic views. It's broken in different ways in both places. The URLs generated start with aff and aft, but in the topics and topic views the afpg is gone and the topic view tries to generate a friendly URL, despite friendly URLs not being enabled in the module settings.

I have gone through the code in PagerNav and believe that something goes wrong in Utilities.NavigateURL, but as far as I can tell that's just a thin wrapper for DNN's common navigation manager.

In the topics view we're getting https://www.capture.se/Support/Forum/aff/104/2/ instead of https://www.capture.se/Support/Forum/aff/104/afpg/2/.

In the topic view we're getting https://www.capture.se/Support/Forum/aff/2bitfocus-companion-question/2/ instead of https://www.capture.se/Support/Forum/aft/9954/afpg/2 - so that's gone both friendly URL and skipped the afpg.

I've taken a look in https://github.com/dnnsoftware/Dnn.Platform/blob/a5a49641d2b0a354a11deedc2ebf8ddefcd034a5/DNN%20Platform/Library/Common/NavigationManager.cs which then leads to friendly URL managers.

Any insights would be appreciated..

[johnhenley]

Hi @LxLasso.

THANK YOU for upgrading and I'm glad to see that it (mostly) went well!

I will take a look and see about the pager issues. Thank you for documenting them so precisely.

Just curious, is there a specific reason why you don't use the friendly URLs?

[LxLasso]

Re: friendly URLs, I don't think so. We've been with DNN since ages, I'm speculating friendly URLs weren't a thing then and we simply never discovered / enabled them? I did try installing the URL rewriter and enabling them, but I couldn't really see a difference in behaviour in the links output by PagerNav anyway.

[johnhenley]

@LxLasso I duplicated and the fix will be in the next release. As a workaround, I verified that enabling "friendly URLs" will resolve this for you in the meantime.

[LxLasso]

Yes, that matches what we've got:

I strikes me as a bit odd that sometimes links are generated with or without the Support/Forum part of the url?

[johnhenley]

The URL rewriter in the forums module is very old and cranky :) and pre-dates the "advanced URL" provider in DNN.
Change the base path to "Forum", and see if that fixes it.

[johnhenley]

The URL rewriter in the forums module is very old and cranky :) and pre-dates the "advanced URL" provider in DNN.
Do you know what version of the Forums module you had originally installed, like did you ever have the "Active Modules" version, say 4.3 installed ??

[LxLasso]

So I tried setting the base path to Forum and that didn't help. Then I tried wiping it, at which point got worse. So I put back "forums", and now it's as if it was still effectively wiped and I can't get the rewriter to get me to any post..

We started at DNN 3.3 I believe. I don't know if we that installed? The only other trace of "Active" in web.config is ActiveDirectory.

[LxLasso]

Setting the base path to "forumz" and then back to "forums" again made the direct links to the latest posts on the forums view work again.

[johnhenley]

Can you run this query ?
It might tell me if you came from a really old version

SELECT *
FROM [activeforums_Settings]
WHERE SettingName= 'URLBASE'

[johnhenley]

There's no setting at all like that! I have attached the full dump..

Settings Dump.tsv

Ok. Thanks.

Appreciate all the back and forth. Although I thought friendly URLs would work, we don't want things to be worse, so turn that off and we'll try something else.

[johnhenley]

Do you have a test server or are you doing these changes in your live site?

[LxLasso]

Alright, I disabled friendly URLs again and we're back to simply pagers not working. We had a test server up until I thought everything was figured out and I went ahead with the upgrade, so I was doing these tests live now. But I'll set up a new test server instead.

[johnhenley]

Ok get a test server set up, I will get you a new release to fix this for you.

[LxLasso]

Thank you so much for your effort! 🙏

[johnhenley]

@LxLasso Please download and test this release candidate to verify that it corrects the pager links.
https://github.com/DNNCommunity/Dnn.CommunityForums/releases/tag/09.00.03-RC1
Once you verify, I will put out the official release.

[johnhenley]

Test server up an running - and I'm happy to confirm that both TopicsView and TopicView paging works now! 🥳

Great news!
Here is the "official" release:
https://github.com/DNNCommunity/Dnn.CommunityForums/releases/tag/09.00.03

[LxLasso]

Excellent, thank you again. Installed in production now, all good.

If no new fires pop up the next days I'll dig further into the friendly URLs.

[johnhenley]

@LxLasso I would still like to work with you to get you using the friendly URLs. Let me set up a test site that matches your page structure and do some testing. Can I reach out to you for any questions?

[johnhenley]

Excellent, thank you again. Installed in production now, all good.

If no new fires pop up the next days I'll dig further into the friendly URLs.

What DNN version are you running?

[LxLasso]

Absolutely, you can mail me at lars@ if you wish (there's no DM here right?).

We run DNN 09.13.09.