Locate : an overlooked feature in Integrity and Scrutiny

 The Locate feature is an overlooked feature in Integrity and Scrutiny. It answers the common question, "Integrity is reporting a broken link on a page but I don't know where to find that page" or "that page shouldn't exist any more".

It tells you, as a user, how to find the link in question and the page it's on. These hyperlinks are clickable.

There may be more than one route to click through from the home page (or your starting url) to the link in question, but this tool should show the shortest.

It's important to distinguish here between link urls, and a single instance of a link.

In this example, I've selected a link url which has tested as good. There may be links with that target url on multiple pages (or multiple links on the same page). For example a link to the home page probably exists on every page of a site, maybe in more than one place on a page.

A context menu* triggered by a right-click or control-click on that url row will only show options that are relevant to that url, or the page at that url. In order to access the Locate feature, you need to right-click one of the link instances, which are revealed when you expand the row.

The By page and By status views both show link instances when the page / status is expanded, so Locate can be accessed in those views after expanding a page/status. All Links is a flat table showing link instances, so Locate will appear when you right-click any row. In all of these cases it's important to only select a single row, Locate can't work on multiple selected items.

Similarly, if you open the link inspector, it concerns a link url and the status of that url when tested, and it has a table listing the instances or occurrences of that url in links. Before using the Locate button (or context menu in that table) it's important to select one of the instances in the table.

Recent versions of Integrity and Scrutiny may have Locate in these context menus but it may not appear to do anything. This is fixed in Integrity and Scrutiny v10.4.12+