[Pages] ALL links when Page name changes

[anthonem]

This idea has been developed and deployed to Canvas

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Here's a common scenario:

An instructor makes a page, let's say a module overview page, and then links to this page from a custom Home page. While developing the course, the instructor changes the name of the module overview page. This breaks the homepage link because the page URL contains the page name.

Please create a system to avoid this common problem.

[lic]

If you rename in the pages section everything will work fine. It doesn't work, when you change names in modules.

[mterborg]

Thanks. Good to know. Now I have to keep the Files section open and remember to use it too. 🙂

[jrblack]

Hi everyone, I was happy to see a possible solution so I tested this today.  The problem still exists for me, even when editing from "pages" instead of modules.  The issue is the page name is part of the URL.  Until that gets fixed, this issue will not be resolved.  Even when using "course links" within the same course, editing the page name still breaks the link (no matter how the edit to the title was made).  I keep hoping this will be fixed someday!

[GilbertWalker]

lic are you sure this works from 'pages'?

I can see this issue was opened in 2015, and still no native solution if I'm reading correctly. Does anyone know of an easy fix in 2022? 

[lic]

I am not sure about anything. They change everything all the time. I know I used it a while back, where it worked, but that might have changed.

[KristinL]

  Comments from Instructure

This idea is In Development. Please follow this thread for updates.

[ThomasMorel]

This is a fundamental flaw that needs to be fixed.  Software Development 101 mistake. 

If this is not fixed soon, I won't be migrating my institution to this platform.  If a fundamental function like this is broken, how many more things in the platform are broken like this but not yet found?

Oh, and it takes 7 years to address it?

smh

[JayParekh]

This should be fixed at the earliest. We create Navigation tabs/tiles on a lot of pages in our courses and especially on the Home page and those tabs/tiles are linked to different pages which are under construction.  As soon as the page name is edited, the Navigation tabs/tiles get broken and the user is unable to access the content. The worst part is that the person who edited the page name does not even know this behaviour and the number of areas where that page is linked and hence fails to update the Navigation tabs/tiles linkage.   

Page name changes can't be avoided and we can't be asking course designers/teachers to not change the page names expecially since our course design includes excessive use of links. 

The issue is not easy to understand for a basic level Canvas user and even the Canvas chat support agent didn't understand this issue on the first attempt and said that this is a URL issue outside Canvas.  I can only imagine how many support tickets would be getting raised worldwide across institutes and Canvas for broken links just because someone edited a page name. 

Let's hope that this is fixed soon!

[wesley_custer]

This really is a major frustration for our instructional design and technology team and our faculty. There would have to be some sort of text scraping of the html looking for the course ID inside a link at the least and updating it will the new course ID. It's in the middle of the link, which does cause some major difficulties.

How might we avoid the false positive if someone has decided to link to a different course? Maybe some sort of specific find and replace process specifying the old course ID and the new course ID so that it would ignore other links?

[dkrasne]

HOW is this still happening??

A common scenario:

* The title for a page has the date in it, for the convenience of students paging through with Modules (or, tbh, accessing the pages in any other fashion).

* The next year, the course is copied, and the page-titles get renamed in order to update the dates for the current year.

* Now anything that linked to that page is broken.

But honestly, renaming pages is a common scenario no matter how you slice it.