Template:Querylink/doc

Quick overview

This template creates an internal link to the specified page (1) with the specified query string (qs) of the form qs=name=value&name2=value2 and optionally the specified caption (2) which defaults to the specified page (1). The intended purpose of this template is to provide the ability to create internal links with a query string component, which addresses a limitation of the current wiki software.

Example usage:

                     1         query string               2
 {{Querylink|Special:Allpages|qs=namespace=1|See what people are talking about}}

Produces: See what people are talking about

Reason

The MediaWiki software does not support the use of a query string element of an URL as part of the internal wiki link syntax. This means that when wishing to link to a page that requires a query string in order to display the desired view of a page, an external link must be used. This is misleading when linking to a page within the wiki itself. For example, to create a link to this page's edit page, one might use the following wikitext: [http://en.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title={{FULLPAGENAMEE}}&action=edit edit]. This would produce the following link: edit. However, the edit page is not really an external link, so the desired result would be edit, without the external link graphic.

Description of use

Internal links with a query string URL element may be achieved through the use of this querylink template. This template has been provided as a workaround for the described wiki software limitation. The template has been designed to be usable in a similar manner to creating a normal internal link, and takes two to three parameters depending upon how you wish to use it. To create the example link from before to this page's edit page using the querylink template, the following wikitext markup was used:

 {{Querylink|Template:Querylink/doc|qs=action=edit|edit}}

All templates are called by enclosing the template name and parameters within a pair of curly braces "{{}}". All parameters are separated with the pipe character "|". The first "parameter" is always the name of the template that you wish to use and as such is not formally a parameter at all. In this case, it is Querylink.

1. The first formal parameter passed to the template should be the name of the internal page that you wish to link. In this case, Template:Querylink/doc.
2. The second parameter is the query string used to display the desired view of the page. It has the form qs= followed by the name and value pairs of the query string of the form name=value&name2=value2. In this case, just one name and value pair is used: action=edit.
3. The third parameter is optional. If included, the text of this parameter will be used as the display name for the link text in the article, similar to piped links. If omitted, the page name will be used instead, similar to ordinary internal links. In this case, we specify a friendly name for the link: edit.

If you wish to apply a query string without a page name, try passing / for the name of the internal link.

{{Querylink|/|2=id=10000|qs=oldid=10000}}

This produces the link id=10000 to the location http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki//?oldid=10000

Limitations

The template normally does not work as a target for #REDIRECT in redirect pages. You can subst: it to achieve that: {{subst:querylink|...}}