Hello,

We have a site which pulls data from a Database into a web interface.
We complained to our web designer that the URLs have no links.

He says it's because it comes from a database.

Please advise us on this b'cos most of the world's portals and big sites keep their content in databases, including ORACLE/SQL databases.

And yet when you look at any CNN, Microsoft or Google News page, the link IS a hyperlink.

Please advise us so we can help the designer realise he's wrong!

Thanks,

BD.

It's because it's litral text. In the database, the URL will appear simply as a peice of text, and when displayed on the page through a server side scripting language, there's nothing to put <a></a> tags around it. You could either put the HTML tags into the links directly in the databse, ie: <a href="http://your.url.here/page.asp">Your URL Text</a> or you could try to get your web designer to find code that will find and replace all URLs in the text with the relevant HTML above.

Hi,

Not sure if I am understanding it correctly, but I think you are only displaying the text instead of populating the href part of the link. Make sure that the results passed back from SQL is populating the right part of the hyperlink. Please give me a bit more detail if this doesn't help.

Regards,

Mark.

What he's saying is, you have 2 options.
1) store the data in the database with the <a href> tags and all. That way the links are already there.

2) When displaying the data from the database, have a script that finds all URLs and adds the neccassary html tags to make them clickable before displaying. Much like the forums here work, if you type www.somesite.com the forum will automaticly create a link out of it.