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# Linkstatus - assess and mend any broken hyperlinks

## Overview

Cocoon has various tools to ensure the internal links. However, there will still be occasional problems. Please help to keep it robust.

External links are a bit trickier. It is not really fair to banish them just because they were not accessible on the day that a link verification was run. Actually the external link situation is going to become an issue, now that we have accepted a whole section of Cocoon Links docs devoted to external resources.

Robust internal links is the main issue. However, how far do we go down the road of external link management? Please help to develop automated solutions.

## Assessment tools

### build docs

Please do "build docs" before creating or committing a patch. The build will fail on internal breaks. (Not sure about links to and within Javadocs.)

### LinkStatus Generator

This Cocoon Sample will start at the home page of the local documentation webapp and traverse each internal link, reporting its status in a colour-coded table.

See Cocoon Samples in your local webapp distribution via `http://localhost:8080/cocoon/samples/linkstatus/` (v2.1 only)

### LinkAlarm web service

Note
We cannot rely on using the LinkAlarm service (a fee-based professional service). We need to develop our own capability.

The excellent LinkAlarm service is used after each public release of Cocoon to help discover any broken external links on the final website. Please see the README file at linkalarm-readme.txt and help to attend to any issues.

The LinkAlarm service traverses the Cocoon website occasionally. The full set of reports are at http://reports.linkalarm.com/373104199608/

There is a new webapp sample that retrieves the summary report `links.broken.txt` and pretty-prints the list. See Cocoon Samples in your local webapp distribution via `http://localhost:8080/cocoon/samples/linkstatus/` (v2.1 only)

## Further development

We need to take more advantage of the capabilities of Cocoon's LinkStatus Generator. Perhaps this can be incorporated into a custom build target for docs.

Errors and Improvements? If you see any errors or potential improvements in this document please help us: View, Edit or comment on the latest development version (registration required).