We recently decided to include an ORM in our next Sitecore project. It should be Glass Mapper. The key feature of the ORM would be, that we can map all our Sitecore items and their data to strongly-typed objects in C#, automatically. One of the first features I had to implement was a Web Api which should return the Url (internal or external) of a General Link field of an item. This url should of course be absolute, so the client system can make use of the url.

My first thoughts were to add some url options to the SitecoreFieldAttribute, but I didn’t find anything about this. And I also didn’t want to make some ugly hacks (hey I’m using Glass Mapper to make it nice, not ugly), hence I ask this on Stack Overflow. Michael Edwards, developer of the Sitecore Glass Mapper project, confirms that this feature is not yet implemented and just created a new version of Glass Mapper. One day after my feature request on Stack Overflow, wow! Thanks again.

So at the end, it became very easy to add url options to a link field:

[SitecoreField(FieldName = "My Link Field", UrlOptions = SitecoreInfoUrlOptions.AlwaysIncludeServerUrl | SitecoreInfoUrlOptions.SiteResolving)]
public virtual Link MyLinkField { get; set; }

As you can see, you can also add multiple options, separated by a pipe ( | ). That’s it.

The SitecoreInfoUrlOptions is an enum with the following values (use them as you would on normal UrlOptions):

public enum SitecoreInfoUrlOptions
{
    Default = 0,
    AddAspxExtension = 1,
    AlwaysIncludeServerUrl = 2,
    EncodeNames = 4,
    LanguageEmbeddingAlways = 8,
    LanguageEmbeddingAsNeeded = 22,
    LanguageEmbeddingNever = 50,
    LanguageLocationFilePath = 100,
    LanguageLocationQueryString = 296,
    ShortenUrls = 598,
    SiteResolving = 1298,
    UseUseDisplayName = 4132
}

Note: As this feature is new, it is only available from release 3.1.6 of Glass Mapper.