Update broke our links using http_referer

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lmd5adm
Community Contributor

We've had MANY links broken with this update.  We currently have a dynamic link that calls out to our server with a php program that looks at the HTTP_REFERER, grabs the course id, then translates that to our content space on our server.  We do it this way because we have so many sections that copy from a master section in to MANY sections and we do not want to force our design teams to have to edit each section in multiple places.  We need a solution to handle the scale. 

This solution has worked since our pilot last year.  Then we noticed that it broke on the mobile apps (but they were looking into it for us).  Now today is is broken across all of our online courses at PSU World Campus.

Anyone else rely on the http_referer or have a way to do links to external content areas so they can be scaled and dynamic?

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lmd5adm
Community Contributor
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<a class="Button--primary Button--large Button icon-calendar-month external" target="_blank" href="https://courses.worldcampus.psu.edu/lms/pageFromUrl2.php?request=/common/wrapsyllabus" title="" rel="noreferrer">

Notice the rel="noreferrer" attribute.  This is added by canvas via their react.js logic.  This was not that way before this weekend's production update.

We also found that we could modify these links to have a class of:  "not_external" and it will still open up in a new window but will permit the http_referer to be sent to our server and logic.  Changing many pages will be painful while courses are live.

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