Hi Jeff,

I'm guessing you upgraded from a fairly old version, I do recall that link icon being there in the early version of the newer file manager but it was removed exactly to avoid problems like this because it was never intended that anyone would link to files directly in the file manager from content. The file manager is locked down for security and should not be used for anything but uploading and downloading and  managing files. To link to a file you should use the link icon in the editor which allows browsing files that you can link to.

The fileservice for security requires a security token to be passed in the url to the file and the security token changes periodically (whenever the application restarts) and it also can only be used by users in roles allowed to use file manager so it is not designed at all to serve files for content links which may be coming from anonymous users. It was an oversight in the early implementation because that link icon was part of the file manager Ui which we got elsewhere and integrated, once we realized that people would use those links we removed it, but apparently you have been using an older version for a long time that included it.

So it is intended and the workaround is to re-link to the files using the link browser in the editor.

Hope it helps,

Joe

Working off your point of not linking directly to files and using the link Icon in the editor then why is there a URL requirement in the simple list control? I think that's what caused the confusion. We are linking to PDF files and it would work to have the link in the description but we can't do that with out a URL. And if the list item goes to the URL then what is the editor for? Is it just there to use the link tool to get the URL?

The List feature has evolved from originally just being a simple list of links into a more flexible feature where it can be a list of html content items. You can disable the link requirement from settings by making it set for Description only.

I agree with you that it would be nice if we had a link browser something like what the editors provide that just hooked into the TextBox input for the url in the List feature. I've got an item in our project tracker for this, just not sure how soon I'll get to it.

What you can do currently though is to use just the descriptions and the editor link browser.

Best,

Joe