Business v6 - Linking to site/catalog index pages?

[Kevin]

Hi.

This seems simple enough in premise, but I'm totally stumped... What's the accepted wisdom on creating links to the site index page and the catalog index page (ie: top level section)?

If I create a link to "/index.html", the B2B script (bb.pl) doesn't parse/replace the link. It does the same thing with "/", and "../" and "../index.html", and "/acatalog/", and "../acatalog", etc. The upshot of this is that if a logged-in user visits the home page, or links to the catalog homepage from a brochure page, he gets presented with the login prompt again on his return because the bb.pl script has dropped the ball.

Presumably, the bb.pl script doesn't know what to do with links that contain paths, so it ignores them. Is this the case? If so, is this likely to be fixed any time soon? I can create a page outside of the /acatalog folder (/index.html) using Business, so surely it should be able to deal with linking to and from it?

As always, any help would be appreciated.

[Nadeem]

Hi there

What's the accepted wisdom on creating links to the site index page and the catalog index page (ie: top level section)?

For logged in customer, the best way in achieving what you want is to use the following method

This is taken from the advance user guide

Taking People Straight to a Section

If you want to link to section pages rather than URLs, then you will simply need to use SECTIONID= followed by the filename of the section page, rather than PRODREF= .
e.g.
http://your.URL/cgi-bin/ss00000x.pl?...html&NOLOGIN=1

Note that you have to encode any non-alphanumeric characters so an underscore '_' becomes '%5f' and a full stop '.' becomes '%2e'.

Linking from Other URLs
Note: If you are using this code from outside the 'acatalog' folder then you will need to include a hidden form field of 'ACTINIC_REFERRER=' where the value is your 'Catalog URL' from 'Advanced | Network Setup'. For example:
http://your.URL/cgi-bin/ss00000x.pl?....URL/acatalog/
and also
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="ACTINIC_REFERRER" VALUE="http://your.URL/acatalog/">

This is the best way, as it does not logout customers

Kind Regards

[Kevin]

Thanks Nadeem - this appears to have done the trick, but seems like an odd hack for something as seemingly-straightforward as linking between two folders.