Broken URL when inserting a link to a Text control

ewuski · October 16, 2025, 7:02am

We have an issue with rendering tracking URLs in emails for some content pages.

The result is that a URL comes broken in the email body.

Replicating the issue

The content structure is as follows:

First root is the main site, with a domain assigned, eg, mydomain.com
The second root is a business site, with a domain, eg, mydomain.com/business

We have several email templates, both campaign and transactional, where we insert links to business site pages, eg, pages of the secondary root with a separate domain as above.

Each time we insert a content page URL in the email body (Content > Text control), it looks correct in the Text control’s code view:

/{localLink:umb://document/4dd37182719c478ea56b1e4fa72a59ff}

as the anchor’s href value. The URLs render correctly in the preview tab.

However, in the email, it comes as a broken link (anchor with empty href).

Hacking the issue

Since the beginning, we have gone around this by inserting URLs manually, which means, instead of selecting the relevant content node when inserting the link, we just fill in the Link field with the full page URL we want to link to. This can obviously lead to mistakes.

As we are getting more and more email templates, this becomes more difficult to control.

Solution?

Is there anything that could be done to fix it?

Versions

Umbraco version 13.2.1

Newsletter Studio version 13.0.16

EssCee · October 17, 2025, 5:34am

This might not help but in the past I extracted the hyperlinks (using regex) from the content editor, obtaining the correct underlying link from the umb URL and then resave/publish the content.

Although this worked, I don’t know if it would satisfy all scenarios that you may have.

ewuski · October 17, 2025, 8:55pm

In Newsletter Studio’s text control?

Luuk · October 18, 2025, 8:02pm

Why haven’t you updated Umbraco to the latest 13? I don’t know all the changes and fixes from the top of my head, but if you are having issues, wouldn’t it make sense to at least have the latest minor version of Umbraco?

ewuski · October 20, 2025, 9:59pm

I don’t think it’s the problem with Umbraco, rather NS @markusjoha

markusjoha · October 21, 2025, 7:22am

Hi @ewuski !

Sounds like a frustrating issue! Thank you for reaching out to help me understand the issue.

I tried to reproduce this problem but I could not get the empty anchor that you’re referring to.

Did you configure the “Culture and Hostname” correctly for the root nodes in the Content-tree so that the resolved URLs are correct?

Would you mind trying to explain the problem in a little more detail so that I can understand what’s happening, since the preview rendering works it sounds like something is going wrong during the creation of the tracking liks (like you said).

Can you please also ensure to include:

Information about your culture and hostname setup
Step by step guide on the setup
Exact details about the links, are you adding any question string etc?
Detailed explanation of where/when the a href attribute becomes empty.

All the best!

// Markus

ewuski · October 21, 2025, 10:37am

Hi Markus, thanks for answering.

All links that are supposed to lead to the secondary website become empty in the email body.

The setup is as follows:

Root website host: mydomain.com
Second website host: mydomain.com/business

It might be that because the domain is the same, the URL is not getting written correctly?

Also, we have variants on each website, not sure if they add to the problem. Their hostname pattern is as follows:

Root:

mydomain. com
mydomain. com/pt
mydomain. com/fr

etc.

Secondary:

mydomain. com/business
mydomain. com/business/pt
mydomain. com/business/fr

etc.

Yes, we add query strings to some, but even without them, the urls become empty in the email body.

markusjoha · October 21, 2025, 12:10pm

Thank you!

In my testing, I never managed to get the href to be empty when having a “nested” root node like in your example.

But just to be clear, when you say it “works” does this mean that you get a link like thi in your email

<a href="http://mydomain.com/__ns/link......">

But then when it does not work, you get an empty attribute?

<a href="">

Do you see any errors in the Log Viewer? (Settings > Log Viewer)

// m

ewuski · October 21, 2025, 3:35pm

No, when it doesn’t work, I mean that the tracking URL does not appear in the anchor in the email body. The anchor is empty, with only the query string if there is any qs provided in the URL in the text control.

I’ll check the log.

ewuski · October 23, 2025, 2:31pm

There are no server log errors.

ewuski · November 5, 2025, 8:39pm

Hi @markusjoha

Is there a chance to take a look at it? Thanks

markusjoha · November 5, 2025, 9:54pm

Hi!

I’ve spent quite some time trying to replicate the issue on Umbraco 13.2.1 and Newsletter Studio 13.0.6.

Here is a example of a full walk trough of the setup and the result, all the links in the sent emails include the path (not just the query string) in the URL:

Is this how you’re setup looks as well?

Do you have any kind of custom code around Newsletter Studio in your setup? I’m thinking things like custom [Render Tasks](Render Tasks | Documentation | Newsletter Studio) or any kind of custom views etc?

If we cannot figure this out over the forum we could maybe talk over email or schedule a Teams meeting or something so that we can try narrow down the issue togheter.

Cheers!

mistyn8 · November 6, 2025, 12:05am

Just in case it’s related/similar there was this issue in UForms for absolute urls in razor email templates..

github.com/umbraco/Umbraco.Forms.Issues

Razor Email Templates and absolute img/href paths?

opened 09:36AM - 18 Jun 25 UTC

mistyn8

type/bug state/sprint-candidate state/reproduced

### Which Umbraco Forms version are you using? (Please write the *exact* version…, example: 13.4.0) 13.5.0 ### Which Umbraco version are you using? (Please write the *exact* version, example: 13.5.2) 13.8.1 ### Issue summary When using `Model.BodyHtml`, `Model.HeaderHtml` or `Model.FooterHtml` if we have sanitised locallinks in the rte for `a.href` or `img.src` when the email is sent we end up with relative paths in the email, which will cause issues as the email is out of context.. (even hardcoding rather than localLink UDIS will end up with RTE sanitising the url from absolute to relative, without messing with rte config but that would then apply globally and not just for when required lilke here in email generation) ### Specifics Currently working around this.. but feels like it's something forms should be doing for us.. with an extenstion method to pass in the section required and the site root (following the pattern for other hardcoded assets in the example template using a ` var siteDomain = Context.Request.Scheme + "://" + Context.Request.Host;`) Or perhaps this could be an extension in core to lean on... `_htmlLocalLinkParser.EnsureInternalLinks(text: Model.BodyHtml, preview: false, urlMode: UrlMode.Absolute)` ?? HtmlAgilityPack as a workaround seems a sensible approach currently.. ```csharp // need to update localLink giving relative path to absolute if (Model.BodyHtml?.ToString() is string html) { var doc = new HtmlDocument(); doc.LoadHtml(html); if (doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//a[@href]") is HtmlNodeCollection links) { foreach (var link in links) { var href = link.GetAttributeValue("href", ""); if (href.StartsWith('/')) { link.SetAttributeValue("href", $"{siteDomain}{href}"); } } Model.BodyHtml = new HtmlString(doc.DocumentNode.OuterHtml); } if (doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//img[@src]") is HtmlNodeCollection images) { foreach (var img in images) { var src = img.GetAttributeValue("src", ""); if (src.StartsWith('/')) { img.SetAttributeValue("src", $"{siteDomain}{src}"); } } Model.BodyHtml = new HtmlString(doc.DocumentNode.OuterHtml); } } ``` ### Steps to reproduce Umbraco forms send razor template email, with links to udis (content or media) the generated email contain relative paths that won't suffice. ### Expected result / actual result all relative paths should be made absolute, either provide an extension method to pass a domain, a canonical url set in forms appsettings, or taking the current domain from the httpContext. (would need to support mutli-lang and cultures too?) --- _This item has been added to our backlog AB#56797_

markusjoha · November 22, 2025, 12:44pm

Hi!

@ewuski, did you have any chance to look at this?

If you have any further insights it would be very interesting, or if you would like to schedule a teams meeting to try to look in to this.

Feel free to reach out over email: markus [ at sign goes here ] enkelmedia.se.

// Markus

markusjoha · November 22, 2025, 12:47pm

Thanks for the link @mistyn8!

The package has a mechanism that will make any relative links or image references absolute, but it seems like the problem here is that the href-attribute becomes totally empty.

ewuski · November 22, 2025, 1:34pm

Hi, sorry, I have not seen your replies. Will take a look over the next few days and come back to you. Thanks for taking a look at it!

ewuski · December 12, 2025, 6:58pm

Thanks for sharing @mistyn8 but we do nt use Umbraco Forms.

ewuski · December 12, 2025, 7:48pm

Hi @markusjoha , sorry for the delay.

First, thanks a lot for looking into it.

We do not have any custom render tasks; we only have our theme setup and various RecipientListProvider, CampaignEmailMergeFieldProvider

However, our setup is slightly different from the ones you showed in your video.

Our Home is not multilingual, and its links always show correctly in the emails:

However, the Business site is multilingual, and its links are the ones that result in empty anchors in the emails:

Just to clarify - all links show correctly in the preview mode. If the content is multilingual, they show the default language links in the email preview stage.

and :

When inspecting the template, when creating a template and after returning to the template before sending. In these cases, the correct page is selected in the tree upon inspection:

I have done a quick test:

As I mentioned above, our Home is not varied by culture, and its links are always correct in the Email body.

To do the test, I allowed Home to be varied by culture
I added its second language version and inserted a link to Home to an email. The page renders correctly (no errors in the browser).
I also allowed a child page under Home to be varied by culture and added its second language content. The page renders correctly (no errors in the browser).
I inserted a link to a child into the email template.

All links showed correctly in the template preview - showing the links to the default language’s content pages.

All links showed empty in the actual email sent.

So to summarise, it looks like the email template shows the default language links in preview. However, the email body shows an empty anchor href.

This is the case when a site is multilingual and has various domain aliases using different languages under one root, so in the case of such a host setup:

Let me know if anything is unclear.

Thank you.

ewuski · December 22, 2025, 7:14pm

I guess that whatever renders the links, it does not know which URL to select (of which culture).
In the minimal scenario, it should default to the default culture.

In the ideal scenario, and the scenario that takes into account the multilingual character of Umbraco, it should allow a selection of the URL’s language version.

Let me know if it makes sense. Thank you.

markusjoha · December 23, 2025, 4:38pm

Hi!

Thank you very much for providing a detailed explanation about the problem and your setup.

After this I understand the problem better and I also tried to reproduce it.

This is a known issue that’s been around since content variants was introduced into Umbraco. There is no way to indicate the culture of a link to a content node in the CMS. The only information that is stored in the link is the content node identifier (the Guid), the culture is always assumed to be the current culture during rendering.

For example. If you want to create a link from your English Page A to your Spanish Page B - there is no way to do that with the built in link picker.

When it comes to Newsletter Studio, the fact that it works during preview-rendering is because this rendering is performed in the context of a backoffice request that has the same culture as the Users backoffice culture settings. When the real rendering is performed (in a background-thread) there is no culture context, hence the link gets resolved to “#” by Umbraco.

I created an issue about this several years ago but I did not get any attention and the new backoffice implementation for v14+ did not address it either.

This feature has not been very requested and this is the first time I hear that someone is having an issue, the obvious workaround is to use the absolute URLs (like you are already doing).

I’ve been hoping for a native solution in the core but I’ve also played with the idea of adding a setting on the email level to indicate the culture or to build my own custom link picker - both of these has significant downsides as it would introduce a custom link format.

I will continue to monitor the development in this area and probably try to make a new attempt to push for a solution in core. In the meantime I would encourage you to stick to your current workaround. And to be explicit, any fix for this will not be introduced in v13 and probably not backported from the version when it’s implemented.

All the best!

// Markus