Hello. We have stumbled upon a situation where we had some accidentally added*** broken characters in data links. On some of our machines those links still work fine, while on others they don’t.
I haven’t been able to find any thread or bug report related with that.
Now, one answer would be to just never add broken characters. But it’s always possibility that someone accidentally will do that in future and we’ll have a problem, when those links stop working. Perhaps it would be possible to introduce some kind of link cleaning, that would ensure any broken characters are ignored?
***This occurred, when using one specific Windows 11 machine and having Fn locked while entering character “&” or “$” in the data link. Then near the entered “&” or “$” character appears additional garbage character (see screenshot). However, on another Windows 11 machine we haven’t been able to reproduce that.
I’m pretty sure they added links by opening panel in edit mode and in panel options clicked “+ Add link” button, but I will check to be absolutely sure and come back to you later
@yosiasz sorry to bother, any follow-up on this? I’ve once again tried to search forums and bug tracker, but haven’t found anything related. Should I try creating a bug ticket perhaps?
Btw, I’ve also updated the original post to better clarify how those garbage characters appear in the data link.
You need to provide reproducible example. Grafana version is missing, is it one browser specific issue, what’s browser config on that broken machine, any browser plugins installed,…
grafana does not have a url sanitizing feature. but the issue might be from the source you are copying that url from and user keyboard issues, since it works on one and does not no another?
Since it is a little tricky to describe and understand, I will clarify how issue appeared step by step:
How those garbage characters appear:
1.1. Open some dashboard
1.2. Open some panel edit mode
1.3. Click “+ Add link” button to open dialog window for creating data link
1.4. Enable Fn Lock
1.5. In data link URL field input symbol “&”
1.6. Now depending on your environment, in URL field may appear either only “&” or “SOME_GARBAGE_CHARACTER&”
What happens when data link contains garbage characters:
2.1. Open dashboard
2.2. Find table panel that has data links with garbage characters
2.3. Click on such link
2.4. Now depending on your environment, the link may or may not work
To ensure that data links do not get broken by garbage characters, there are probably 2 options that can be implemented:
A. Sanitize URL on input (step 1.6.)
B. Sanitize URL on read (step 2.4.)
Question is - would Grafana team be willing to implement either of these?
If needed, I can try providing more info on what specific environments (OS, browser configurations) we have problems on steps 1.6. and 2.4..
That should be provided first. Who know which Grafana version you have - this is still not provided. You may have some old unsupported version, then there is no point to even debug your problem.
v11.4 is Grafana version on which data links with those garbage characters do not work on SOME environments.
(I wish I could provide more information of the environment (the operating system, browser, etc) where they didn’t work, but for now that’s all the info I managed to get.)