Link names

[Martins]

Hello,

Im new to Confluence and wanted to understand, how link names are created, e.g. when looking at Page Tree or navigating using Page Tree.

For example, I created a space and page, it will have links, something like /pages/viewpage.action?pageId=xxxx

Other page, same location, will have links to /display/[Project]/[PageName]

So one of the links looks nice and understandable, where it leads to, while other links just point to page with ID X.

Why sometimes I get one type of link, other times another?

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted solution]

Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Actually, all pages have a url with the pageid=xxxx, that's the primary name for it.

The display/space/pagename format is a "friendly url", in fact an alias that lands on the same page.  There's still a pageid=xxxx behind it.  If you edit a page you get to with either type of url, you'll find the url of the editor works off just pageid=xxxx.

The friendly links are a translation of the page title.  The code that translates it can only cope with certain non-alphanumeric characters.  It translates a space into a + and doesn't do a lot else.  If you put in a simple character that is not valid in plain unencoded urls, it doesn't have a substitute, so it can't generate a url for it, and it just reverts to using the pageid=xxxx.

Moral: if you want friendly urls, don't put special characters in your page names!