Sitecore SXA IsLink (Magic) and Open links in a new tab for OOTB navigation component

 Hello People,

I hope you all are doing just well in this pandemic time and staying home and working from home, Today i will just have a very quick post to demonstrate some of the flexibility of SXA 

Requirement

Well, we had very simple requirement where we used OOTB navigation component, and everything worked just fine but we wanted to have all those link open in a new tab, So we started looking at what HTML this navigation component is returning, So we can just create a clone and have our custom links generated, but it did not help as existing component just renders the variant so structure must have been defined in variant 

Solution

So next check was for variant structure and i observe that there are no link ("anchor" tag defined), but the beauty of SXA is there is a field call "Is Link" which converts your text field into anchor while rendering, see below 

1) Here if you see "Is link" is the one responsible for converting any field of a variant to an anchor (quite cool and handy)

2) And second solution to the problem is because its creating a link internally we needed a way to add target="_blank" to all anchors generated in navigation and if you see "Link attributes" fields, over there you can specify those custom attributes to get those rendered when links are generated

Now all menu links of OOTB navigation component will open in a new window 

I think very helpful and quick solution, Powerful SXA !!!

See you in the next post.