silverstripe-framework/docs/en/02_Developer_Guides/01_Templates/How_Tos/03_Disable_Anchor_Links.md

title: Disable Anchor Rewriting

Disable Anchor Rewriting

Anchor links are links with a "#" in them. A frequent use-case is to use anchor links to point to different sections of the current page. For example, we might have this in our template:

<ul>
    <li><a href="#section1">Section 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="#section2">Section 2</a></li>
</ul>

Things get tricky because of we have set our <base> tag to point to the root of the site. So, when you click the first link you will be sent to http://yoursite.com/#section1 instead of http://yoursite.com/my-long-page/#section1

In order to prevent this situation, the SSViewer template renderer will automatically rewrite any anchor link that doesn't specify a URL before the anchor, prefixing the URL of the current page. For our example above, the following would be created in the final HTML

<ul>
    <li><a href="my-long-page/#section1">Section 1</a></li>
    <li><a href="my-long-page/#section2">Section 2</a></li>
</ul>

There are cases where this can be unhelpful. HTML anchors created from Ajax responses are the most common. In these situations, you can disable anchor link rewriting by setting the SSViewer.rewrite_hash_links configuration value to false.

app/_config/app.yml

SilverStripe\View\SSViewer:
  rewrite_hash_links: false

Or, a better way is to call this just for the rendering phase of this particular file:

use SilverStripe\View\SSViewer;

public function RenderCustomTemplate() 
{
    SSViewer::setRewriteHashLinks(false);
    $html = $this->renderWith('MyCustomTemplate');
    SSViewer::setRewriteHashLinks(true);

    return $html;
}