Paths and Slugs | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

This article outlines:

How to define the paths for your pages using the getPath function
The slug field and how it works
The benefits of using the slug field for your paths and best practices
How the slug field is required for local development “dynamic mode”

Overview

The slug field allows a user to define the “path” at which a page of their website is served. For example, if a page is served at www.yext.com/hello/world, the slug would be hello/world.

The slug helps to ensure that the paths for your web pages are URL-safe by performing validation and slugification for any inputted strings.

getPath Function

getPath is a required function in your templates that returns a string. This string defines the path at which the page generated from that template is accessible in production.

Stream Templates

For Stream templates (i.e. pages generated from Streams), we highly recommend returning the slug field. Refer to the example below:

export const getPath: GetPath<TemplateProps> = ({ document }) => {
  return document.slug;
};

Technically, you can return any field (or combination of fields) from your Stream document to getPath, but you must use the slug field in order to test your paths during local development.

Static Templates

For static templates (i.e. individual pages that aren’t based on Stream documents), you can simply define your page path by returning a string. Refer to the example below:

export const getPath: GetPath<TemplateProps> = () => {
  return `about`;
};

Slugs

Slug is a field type that ensures your paths are always “URL-safe”. It accomplishes this by doing two things:

Validation: Validates when you attempt to publish a non URL-safe value
- For example, here the Knowledge Graph throws an error because the input (“not url safe”) includes spaces.
- A legal slug may only contain the following characters:
  1. Letters (i.e. any character from Unicode categories beginning with “L”)
  2. Numbers (i.e. any character from Unicode categories beginning with “N”)
  3. Any of the following characters: ( ) _ ~ : @ ; = / ’ $ * - . &
Slugification: Automatically “slugifies” embedded field references
- It is extremely useful to include embedded fields as part of your slug (refer to the Embedded Fields module to learn more). This allows you to define your page paths based on fields from your entity data. In such scenarios, the slug field automatically converts each embedded reference into a URL-safe string!
- In the example below, the slug is defined as [[address.region]]/[[address.city]]/[[name]]; assume that the underlying embedded fields evaluate to NY/New York/Turtlehead Tacos. The slug dynamically converts this input to ny/new-york/turtlehead-tacos.
- Slugification Logic is defined as follows:
  1. Convert any uppercase letter to lowercase
  2. Replace any of - ? # with a space
  3. Trim (i.e. remove any leading/trailing whitespace)
  4. Replace each set of one or more consecutive whitespace characters with -
  5. Strip any illegal character

Benefits of Slug-Based Paths

It is highly recommended to define the paths for Stream-generated pages based on the slug field, as opposed to other fields or hardcoded values. This practice offers two major benefits:

By defining paths solely based on the slug field, non-developer users have the ability to update production URLs by directly editing slugs in the Knowledge Graph; no template-level code changes are required!
It is required that you return the slug in your getPath function to test your production paths during *local development*. The Pages system uses this field specifically to generate page paths during local development. If a slug value is missing from one of your entities, you will not be able to preview that entity locally using “dynamic mode”.

Using an Alternate Slug Field in Local Development

Note

You must be using at least PagesJS v1.0.0-rc.9 to use this feature.

As mentioned in the previous section, the Pages system uses the slug field for generating page paths during local development. If you would like to override this behavior, you can add a slugField to your TemplateConfig to reference an alternate slug field.

export const config: TemplateConfig = {
  stream: {
    $id: "locations",
    fields: ["id", "name", "address", "c_alternateSlug"],
    filter: {
      entityTypes: ["location"],
    },
    localization: {
      locales: ["en"],
    },
  },
  slugField: "c_alternateSlug",
};

Disabling “Slug-Based” Local Dev URLs

By default, the npm run dev command will automatically use the slug field to generate your paths. However, you may have some entities for which the slug field is either not populated or not enabled on the entity type at all; and still want to test use these entities for local development.

If you are using a Yext starter, you can disable this behavior with the following command:

npm run dev -- --no-prod-url

This command will serve your local URLs in the following format, which will only be used locally and will not match what is served in production:

localhost:5173/[template-name]/[entity-id]

Slug Best Practices

To ensure your URLs are always in a clean state, please adhere to the following best practices. Failure to do so may result in page generation failures:

Ensure each entity in your stream has a slug value (in other words, ensure your slugs are never null for an entity used to power a page in your site).
- In case of null values in your live production deploy, we recommend you configure a “fallback” path in your getPath function. The starter templates for Pages projects contain sensible defaults like below for location entities.
```
export const getPath: GetPath<TemplateProps> = ({ document }) => {
  return document.slug
    ? document.slug
    : `${document.locale}/${document.address.region}/${document.address.city}/${
        document.address.line1
      }-${document.id.toString()}`;
};
```
  Here we use the location’s region, city, and address line 1 to create a unique path.
Ensure that your slugs do not begin with a forward slash (/). If your slug begins with a forward slash, this will cause the page to be served at an invalid URL.
Ensure each slug is unique with respect to other entities used for your site. If any two pages in your site share the same path, both pages will fail to generate.

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