Sitecore Scriban Extension - How To Control a Link Field!

In this post I will show you a couple of custom Scriban extensions that I needed to create on a recent project I was working on, first example is how you can get an item URL counting for server URL / Site resolving and another example of how you can pull a link of a link field. Before that if you're new to Scriban, take a quick look for this post, I'm sure you will find it useful. 

While working on a call to action variant for the carousel SXA rendering, I need to pull the Url from the data source item link field, I wanted a way to also count for site resolving as I have multisite, or count for internal, external...etc type of links, in addition to control some custom attributes I wanted to add to my anchor tag.

I found that we can build a custom Scriban extension to do that, we can have a backend processor, where you can pass the target item and the field name, and a simple couple of lines of backend code to generate the Url, Following are the steps you can follow to accomplish this:

Create a custom processor that inherit IGenerateScribanContextProcessor, following is the full processor code:

	public class GetLinkUrl : IGenerateScribanContextProcessor
	{
	private readonly IContext context;
	private delegate string LinkUrlDelegate(Item item, string linkFieldName);
	public GetLinkUrl(IContext context)
	{
	this.context = context;
	}
	public void Process(GenerateScribanContextPipelineArgs args)
	{
	var linkTargetUrl = new LinkUrlDelegate(GetLinkURL);
	args.GlobalScriptObject.Import("get_link", (Delegate)linkTargetUrl);
	}
	public string GetLinkURL(Item item, string linkFieldName)
	{
	if (item == null)
	return "#";
	if (item.Fields[linkFieldName] == null)
	return "#";
	LinkField lnkField = (LinkField)item.Fields[linkFieldName];
	if (lnkField == null)
	return "#";
	return lnkField.GetFriendlyUrl();
	}
	}

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

 Next, you will need to register your custom processor into the generateScribanContext pipeline, see the following simple configuration patch file:

	<sitecore>
	<pipelines>
	<generateScribanContext>
	<processor type="Sitecore.Foundation.SitecoreExtensions.ScribanExtensions.GetLinkUrl, Sitecore.Foundation.SitecoreExtensions" resolve="true" />
	</generateScribanContext>
	</pipelines>
	</sitecore>

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Start using the extension in your Scriban template as following:

{{get_link i_item "PromoLink"}}

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Lets assume that you have one site, simple link that you just need to add a couple of attributes to, following is a simple way you can go with:

{{ sc_field i_item "PromoLink" [["attribute1", "attribute1value"],["attribute2", "attribute2value"]]}}

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Hope the above help, stay around, on the next post will show you how to build a quick custom search results using rendering variants and Scriban.