Your Visit our help center link doesn’t link to your help center

At the bottom of all your Hosted Login screens is a link that says Visit our help center:

However, when you click that link you don’t actually go to your help center. Instead, you merely open up a second copy of the page you happen to be on (this page will open in either a new window or a new tab, depending on your browser configuration):

Is that supposed to be helpful?

No, not really: it’s just the default behavior. Because Akamai has no way of knowing which URL you do want to send users to, we set the Visit our help center URL to this:

#

That syntax simply takes you to the top of the page. And because we’ve also set the HTML target property to _blank, that means “Open the current page in another window (or tab) and then go to the top of the page.”

But you don’t really care about that, do you? What you care about is this: how can I configure a different URL for the Visit our help center link?

As it turns out, the URL for the Visit our help center link is stored in the flow as a, well, link. That means that you can use the link Configuration APIs to modify that URL (or, more technically, to modify the elementHref property). We won’t explain how this all works in this article, but a Curl command similar to the following should do the trick:

curl -X PUT \
'https://v1.api.us.janrain.com/config/79y4mqf2rt3bxs378kw5479xdu/flows/testFlow/links/linkHelp' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -H 'Authorization: Basic eTR4Zmc2ZjQ0bXNhYzN2ZXBqanZ4Z2d6dnQzZTNzazk6OTVjY3hrN2N6YnZ1eng2ZHB0ZTVrOXA2ZGo1Ynpla3U=' \
  -d '{
    "elementHref": "https://identitydocs.akamai.com",
    "elementText": {
        "key": "12ed346de096c8dd8f5407ad1aa4aaa6",
        "path": "fields.linkHelp.elementText",
        "values": {
            "en-US": "Visit our help center."
        }
    },
    "name": "linkHelp",
    "target": "_blank"
}'

In the preceding command, we set the elementHref property to https://identitydocs.akamai.com. In turn, that means that any time someone clicks Visit our help center then https://identitydocs.akamai.com should open up in a new tab or new window. And guess what? That’s exactly what it does: