Hide Hyperlinks From Site Visitors ( By Bipin Joshi )

Hide Hyperlinks From Site Visitors ( By Bipin Joshi )

Introduction

When you move your mouse pointer on any of the link in the browser, the
corresponding hyperlink is shown in the status bar. As a webmaster or
developer of a web site, many times you want to hide such hyperlinks in your
pages. This is needed frequently in download pages to hide the original
content location or payment related pages. In this small code sample we will
use ASP.NET HyperLink web control to display our links and then write code
to hide them from the site visitors.

The code

As an example let us assume that you have a HyperLink control called
HyperLink1 on the web form. When that control is rendered in the browser; it
gets converted into an HTML tag. In order to hide the URL from the end
user we need to handle three of its client side events:
* OnMouseOver
* OnMouseMove
* OnContextMenu
You might be wondering why we need to handle the third event. This is event
is raised when user right clicks on the link. Since we want to hide the
link; we also would not like the visitors to use "Copy Shortcut" option from
the right click menu. Hence, we also need to handle the OnContextMenu event.
Note that these are client side events and we need to write JavaScript code
to handle them. There are two steps involved in this:

* Attach client side events and their event handler function in your server side code.
* Write client side function to handle the events Attaching events and event handler

In order to attach a client side event and its handler ASP.NET provides an
Attributes collection. You can use this collection as follows:

HyperLink1.Attributes.Add("onmouseover","HideLink();");
HyperLink1.Attributes.Add("onmousemove","HideLink();");
HyperLink1.Attributes.Add("oncontextmenu","return false;");

Here, we are specifying that OnMouseOver client side event will be handled
by a function called HideLink(). In the OnContextMenu event we simply want
to return false to indicate as if that event never fired.

Client side function

Here is the JavaScript function that does the job for us.

function HideLink()
{
window.status="You do not see the link here!";
}

Here, we simply set the status bar text of the browser window to some custom
text. That's it.

About the author
Name : Bipin Joshi