Broken images and links within DotNetNuke are very common for instances of the application that have been migrated from one server to another, or from a server to a development machine. There are usually a few ways to combat the situation, but some ways cause more problems than they correct. This is because most solutions involve a quick Search and Replace within the data table by converting the value to a varchar, executing the REPLACE function and then updating the table with the new value. Often this causes trouble since varchar has a length maximum of 8000 characters, and many rows within your table may be longer than that, and will consequently end up truncated.

The problem is represented generally by images broken due to the URL within the text having a value which pushes the URL outside of the application domain. Meaning - you may have a server instance with image sources like: /Portals/0/thisimage.gif. On a server with the domain thisServer.com, while the local installation is contained within a virtual directory like “localhost/DNN_thisServer”. The images work on the server, but not within your local environment.

• The rendered output on the target server is correct - http://thisserver/Portals/0/thisimage.gif
• The rendered output on the local instance within a virtual directory is incorrect -
  http://localhost/Portals/0/thisimage.gif should have read http://localhost/DNN_thisServer/Portals/0/thisimage.gif 

The reason for the failure is that the URL is reading the slash in the front of the URL and jumping to the parent directory, only since you are on a Virtual Directory on localhost - it is jumping outside of the application directory - therefore returning a broken link.

This is a very common problem, and the best solution is to replace the URL's on the fly with a corrected value. Since again we are restricted due to the data type of the column, we cannot simply exercise the REPLACE function within SQL to correct the values - instead we need to utilize the inherent text functions which are provided within SQL Server which takes a little more work, but does the trick.

Provided is a procedure which can be called to replace any value you want with whatever the replacement would be with the DesktopHtml column of the HtmlText table. To correct this issue - you can simply create this procedure on your database and execute it directly. For this above example you would execute:

Replace_DesktopHtml '/Portals/0/',''

Execution of the above would remove any instance of the /Portals/0/ value therefore correcting the issue. Verification has been added to the procedure to check that the anticipated length of the outgoing data matches the original length minus the count of values replaced and the difference between the value we are looking for and the value we are replacing it with. Any records which fail this verification are not updated and are instead returned by the procedure.

With no further ado - here is the full procedure:

Kevin, this is a fantastic tip.  I keep running into this problem and have been fixing it the hard way.

thanks for the great procedure.

I have to change the name of a company that is scatterd throughout some 40 or so pages located in various TEXT/HTML modules as content.

So for the sake of illustration and helping understand just what to do,
and using your script, how would i and mass replace  
"Joe's Cafe" with "Buckwheat's Cafe"

In other words how do i modify the execution of
Replace_DesktopHtml

to swap "Joe's Cafe" with "Buckwheat's Cafe" throughout the site?

PLEASE... advise...

Thank you in advance for your response to this post.... otherwise i'm going to be up all night.