Hyperlinks in Instructional Text
complete
Wes Miller
When building out template, it would be good to allow active hyperlinks within the Text Field component's instructional text. This is allowed in the Guidelines Field component, just not the others.
Log In
James Peacock
complete
Hi all. Today we have released an update to the way instructional text handles URLs. When a URL is inserted into instructions, they become links when viewed in the content editor.
So why have we implemented it in this way? It means we can get links working in instructional text quicker. Implementing the full formatting toolbar (apparent in guideline fields) is a lot more work. We're going to keep an eye on feedback to determine whether this solution will suffice, or whether full formatting options are required. Remember, if you do want to fully format instructional text, maybe a guideline field would be better suited!
For now I shall mark this as complete, and thank you for your input.
James Peacock
in progress
As part of our ongoing commitment to improving our authoring experience, I'm pleased to announce we'll be adding this feature. Thank you for your involvement on this!
Wes Miller
James Peacock: Wonderful! So pleased to see it's progression.
James Peacock
Wes Miller: Hi Wes. Our current solution to this problem is the automatic application of hyperlinks to URLs added to instructional text, as opposed to implementing the toolbar functionality of guideline fields.
Instructional text is meant to provide a snippet of information to the author, whereas guideline fields are there to provide much richer content to help guide authors through entire items or groups of fields. The positive outcome of this is that all existing URLs that have been added to instructional text will become active hyperlinks with no further work needed on your behalf.
How does this sound as a solution to you?
Wes Miller
James Peacock: Will I be able to hyperlink a piece of text (i.e. Click Here) in the instructional text or will I have to include the entire URL? The problem with the latter approach is some URLs to SharePoint and documents can be extremely lengthy and not clean. It will start to make the instructional text fields at the component level very busy.
James Peacock
Wes Miller: in today's release I'm afraid that's not possible. I'll bring it up with my team and see if there's a way around it, without the need to implement the full rich-text editor.