Reference Tags

Reference tags can be used to create references to various elements in your site. They can be used in any textual fields, including Text cells within a Table field.

The syntax for reference tags looks like this:

{<Type>:<Identifier>:<Property>}

As you can see, they are made up three segments:

  1. <Type> – The type of element you’re creating a reference to. This can be a fully-qualified element class name (e.g. craft\elements\Entry) or the element type’s “reference handle”.

    Core element types have the following reference handles:

    • entry
    • asset
    • tag
    • user
    • globalset

  2. <Identifier> – Either the element’s ID or a custom identifier supported by the element type.

    Entries support the following custom identifier:

    • sectionHandle/entry-slug

    Identifiers can also include the site ID, UUID, or handle that the element should be loaded from, using an @<Site> syntax.

  3. <Property> (optional) – The element property that the reference tag should return. If omitted, the element’s URL will be returned.

    You can refer to the element types’ class references for a list of available properties:

    Custom field handles are also supported, for field types with values that can be represented as strings.

# Examples

The following are valid reference tags:

  • {asset:123:filename} – returns the filename of an asset with the ID of 123 (via craft\elements\Asset::getFilename() (opens new window)).
  • {entry:blog/whats-on-tap} – returns the URL of an entry in a blog section with the slug whats-on-tap.
  • {entry:blog/whats-on-tap@en:intro} – returns the value of an intro custom field on a blog section entry with the slug whats-on-tap, loaded from the site with the handle en.
  • {craft\commerce\Variant:123:price} – returns the price of a Commerce Variant object with the ID of 123.
  • {globalset:aGlobalSet:uid} – returns the UID of a global set with the handle aGlobalSet.

# Parsing Reference Tags

You can parse any string for reference tags in your templates using the parseRefs filter:

{{ entry.body|parseRefs|raw }}