Question

I apologize if this turns out to be Well Documented {Tm}, but I couldn't come up with a search string that would find it. I have an application where I want to include a menu link that when clicked jumps directly to the edit mode for a particular topic (not the one that's current.) I can't seem to figure out quite how to make this work.

I can do something like

[[http://%HOST_HTTP%%SCRIPTURLPATH%/edit/%WEB%.MyTopicHere][Edit my topic.]]

Environment

-- MichaelBaum - 03 Jun 2005

Answer

Here's whole link sytax you're looking for:

%SCRIPTURLPATH%/edit%SCRIPTSUFFIX%/%WEB%/%TOPIC%?t=%GMTIME{"$year$month$day$hours$minutes$seconds"}%

If the menu item is in the topic itself, the easier option is simply using the %EDITURL% variable. However, I don't think that will work if the link is contained in a topic that's inserted using %INCLUDE.

-- LynnwoodBrown - 03 Jun 2005

I'm not so sure about that. Doesn't the t argument in the edit link require a Unix-style time code along the lines of "1118072521"? And wouldn't %GMTIME{"$year$month$day$hours$minutes$seconds"} render something more like 2005Jun06154255????

-- MichaelBaum - 06 Jun 2005

2005Jun06154255 would actually work, as the point of the parameter is to generate a unique URL to prevent (browser) caching. the code doesn't actually do anything with it (afaik).

anyway, you "need" to use $mo, not $month, which i posted before, but it probably got massacred in a refactoring oh well btw, an example of this usage is located in the WebLeftBarPersonalTemplate

-- WillNorris - 06 Jun 2005

Ah. Of course. It doesn't actually calculate anything with the value. Still, when I tried to paste that string into my test document, it behaved way odd and took me to some commercial web services site as opposed to, oh, I don't know, loading my TWiki page for editing.

Was that because I was trying to use the TWiki link shorthand with the nested brackets: [[link code][link name]] ??? I notice in the WebLeftBarPersonalTemplate (which, actually, is where I was planning to use this) this trick is coded as straight-up HTML code with the <a ...> anchors and all.

And while I'm at it, should we maybe have a TWiki %VARIABLE% that exposes the timestamp string returned by time() at each new page load? I can imagine applications where that'd be useful.

-- MichaelBaum - 07 Jun 2005