External Link
External Link: opens a URL outside the app — same tab or new tab — when its signal fires.
External Link leaves the app: when do fires, the browser navigates to link, in a new tab when openInNewTab is true. It performs no in-app routing. It reports done once the link has been handed to the browser, failure when there is no Link or a popup blocker refused the new tab, and unchanged during a server-side render where there is no browser to open anything in — with Open In New Tab off the page is replaced, so nothing downstream of done may still exist.
When to use it
Documentation links, third-party checkout, mailto/tel URLs. For anything inside the app use Navigate or Navigate To Path, which keep SPA state alive.
At a glance
| Category | Navigation |
| Type name | net.noodl.externallink |
| Available in | browser |
| SSR compatibility | safe |
| Provided by | noodl-viewer-react |
Inputs
Values
| Name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
link | String | — | Web address to open; one with no scheme is resolved relative to the page the app is served from |
openInNewTab | Boolean | true | Opens the link in a new tab; when off the current page is replaced and the app unloads |
Signals
| Name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
do | Signal | — | Opens Link, or fires Failure if there is no Link or the link was opened outside a user action |
Outputs
Signals
| Name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
completed | Signal | — | Fires after every invocation, whatever the outcome — wire this to carry on regardless. Failure still fires and still carries its reason, so this cannot hide an error |
done | Signal | — | Fires once the link has been handed to the browser. It does not promise a tab appeared — nothing readable in the page does, once Open In New Tab is on. With it off the page is replaced, so nothing downstream of this may still exist |
unchanged | Signal | — | Fires when there is no browser to open a link in — a server-side render, where there is nothing to do and nothing to fail at |
Failure outputs
| Name | Type | Default | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
error | String | — | Why the link could not be opened, set just before Failure fires |
failure | Signal | — | Fires when no Link was set, or when the link was opened outside a user action — the case a browser refuses a new tab for. A tab blocked for any other reason still reports Done |
Watch out for
- Pointing External Link at the app's own routes — the full page reload throws away application state that Navigate would keep.
Examples
URL-driven detail page: Router, Page Inputs, Navigate To Path and External Link
URL-style navigation end to end. A Router named 'Main' hosts /Home and /Product (its pages parameter is { routes, startPage }); each page component is rooted by a Page node whose urlPath defines its URL pattern — /Product uses 'product/{productId}', so the id lives in the URL. On /Home, a Navigate To Path node (PageStackNavigateToPath) builds the URL from its path parameter: the '{productId}' placeholder becomes the p-productId input, set here as a parameter, and clicking the button pushes the compiled path into browser history, which the Router picks up. On /Product, a Page Inputs node declares pathParams: "productId" so the value parsed from the URL is exposed as its pm-productId output, wired into a Text. An External Link node (net.noodl.externallink) opens an outside URL in a new tab — external URLs never go through the Router.
Turn rows into a file the browser downloads
Two JavaScriptFunction nodes in series and no backend anywhere: the first folds an array of objects into CSV text, the second wraps that text in a Blob and hands URL.createObjectURL the result, and External Link opens it. That URL is the whole trick — it is a real, fetchable address that exists only inside this tab, so the download never leaves the browser and nothing has to be uploaded first. ⚠️ Compare it with net.noodl.ToCSV before reusing the conversion half: the built-in node handles quoting and embedded delimiters, which hand-rolled CSV usually does not. The half worth copying is the object-URL download.
Related nodes
Navigate, Navigate To Path, Cloud File
This page is generated from node-catalog-enriched.json. Do not edit it by hand — run npm run docs:nodes to regenerate, and fix the source enrichment instead.