I have an Orchard 1.6 site hosted on Windows Server 2012, IIS 8.5, .NET 4.0.
I need to add a link to a network-hosted file into my Orchard menus, where the network share is accessible from my web server - the destination file itself resides on a different server. I put in file://path/to/network/file in the Custom Link menu URL, but the base URL of the site always gets prepended to the link.
E.g., if my base URL is http://example.com, the link becomes http://example.com/file://path/to/network/file, and then .NET does not like the second : in the path - on top of it being the incorrect link. No combination of forward-slashes, backslashes, or other symbols prevents the prepended base URL.
To add another wrinkle to this, the same URL scheme works fine with a slightly different setup: Orchard 1.6, Windows Server 2008, IIS 7.0, .NET 4.0; web server and destination network URL are on the same server.
Is there a way to force Orchard to use the URL as given, without changing it at all? Alternatively, where is the code that constructs the final link?
Using a 'HTML menu item' instead of 'Custom link' to insert raw HTML as a link does work, but that seems like a pretty kludgy workaround; I have to do this for a few dozen links, and I won't necessarily be the one to change them later on.
I've looked into Orchard settings and IIS settings; neither has anything about rewriting links. Changing the base URL on Orchard to match the expected destination server doesn't work (and wouldn't be acceptable long-term). I've also tried hosting a temporary local file (c:\temp\test.txt) but I can't even get that to produce the correct file:// destination on the new setup.
Upgrading to the latest Orchard (1.8.x) is not a feasible solution (if that even ends up being a possible solution).
Edit:
I should clarify that both sites are on an intranet; I'm aware of the security implications associated with file:// links, and the problems with getting various browsers to load them properly, but I want to get the link generation working first.
Edit: problem source
I figured out why link handling was inconsistent between my own sites - I had written a small chunk of Javascript in the first site to strip the application's base URL for any file:// links it encountered. I forgot that it was there and hardcoded to remove only a certain base URL, so when I moved the site to a different hostname, it broke.
So, no inconsistency in Orchard, just my own faulty memory.
Orchard deliberately limits menu links to mailto, tel, http, and https protocols, and excludes all others, such as file and ftp (see navigationmanager.cs). If you want to use other protocols, you will have to use another type of menu item, but please keep in mind that the file protocol is unsafe and is not supported by all browsers, for security reasons (see for example http://kb.mozillazine.org/Links_to_local_pages_do_not_work). Even Internet Explorer has stopped supporting it in the Internet zone since IE6 SP1: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa767731(v=vs.85).aspx