Page has URL that redirects to external URL

RozelleNortje

We have a couple of Pages that act as external URL tools. Somehow, URLs were added to the HTML content that redirects as soon as you try to view the content on the Page. It is impossible to edit the page because it immediately redirects.

We employed a freelance learning designer and no longer have access to the original content used. Ideally, we would like a solution to remove the link, go in, and edit the Pages without needing to redesign about 16 weeks' worth of content. Any idea how to circumvent the redirect? I have tried copying the Pages' URLs with /edit and it still redirects.

James

@RozelleNortje 

You are mixing some terms together that don't normally go together, so I'm not completely sure what is happening. I'll throw a bunch of stuff out here and hopefully one of them will help.

Pages refer content pages. To automatically move to an external location, they would need to employ JavaScript, which is not allowed within content pages. It's possible that you have custom JavaScript that looked for content and did the redirect. If so, you could edit the JavaScript using the theme manager, but in some cases, your JavaScript will just load JavaScript from another site (our Atomic Search does this). Canvas also recently (within the last year, I think) implemented a redirect feature when you rename a page.

Regardless, you can edit pages without actually loading them and getting any redirect. Use the Canvas Pages API to load the page. Then modify the body and update the page.

Canvas has an External URL that gets loaded as a module item, not as a page. This allows people to add a module item that contains an external link and you can load it in a new tab. When you open it from the modules or navigate to the item (using Previous and Next at the bottom without loading it in a new tab), it automatically tries to load the page in an iframe to prevent content on that page from doing bad things with the credentials of the user logged into Canvas.

You can edit these from the modules page, but I don't think that's what you're wanting to do.

If this is what you're talking about, then that page -- the one with the external URL -- is not hosted within Canvas [unless you're one of those people who uploaded HTML files to Canvas and then linked to them], then you're not editing it from within Canvas. The content is on another page. You need to find the source location on an external (to Canvas) server and edit there. If you don't have control over that page, then you may need to reach out to the owner. If it's a freelance designer that you don't have access to anymore, then you may need to host your own version of the file on a server somewhere. 

Depending on how the redirect is done, there may not be any content on the page that you are linking to. If the page uses JavaScript to handle the redirect, then you could use tools like curl or wget or other tool to fetch the content. They don't attempt to execute JavaScript like a browser would, so it would save any content. If the page is hosted on another site, you could disable JavaScript in the browser through the developer tools and then load the page.

If the redirect comes from the server itself, then you won't be able to access the page using curl, wget, or disabling JavaScript. For example, I had to reconstruct a tool I had and changed technology from PHP to JavaScript. I had hundreds of locations that referred to probcalc.php and other people had linked to it as well. There's no way to go through and change all those, so I told the server to automatically redirect the probcalc.php to the new location. There's nothing you can do on your end to get around that other than to reach out to the maintainer of the website.

Note that if you do happen to be one of those people who missed my warnings here in the Community about uploading HTML files into Canvas and then linking to them and did it anyway because "it could be done" or "I don't have external server to host files" or "I want to keep everything together" or whatever the reason, then you will can use the Canvas file system to find the file. You will need to edit it outside Canvas and re-upload it. There is also a content security policy that Canvas put in place to keep JavaScript in uploaded files from doing bad things, but your institution may not be using it.

Canvas has an External Tool that you can load as a module item that launches tools from third-party providers such as publisher systems. These require a special set up and cannot be executed from within a content page in Canvas or an external URL.