How to Create a Link Between Items in the Same Document

Hello all, is there a concept of creating a link between items in the same document? I’m currently trying to work out the best approach for a citations module. My initial thinking was to have an array type where I can populate an array of citation objects on a document. Then I’d need to “link” to each of these citations inside a block editor. But I’m thinking this may not be possible and I’ll have to go for a more global approach for the list of citations and create a new document type for those and link via reference in the block editor instead (similar to internal link examples).
I’ve seen this example:
https://codesandbox.io/s/how-to-render-footnotes-in-portable-text-in-react-iupur
But I’m not sure that’s quite the approach I want to take. I may have many “block” modules on a page each of which could have citations, plus the above also doesn’t address being able to link to the same citation without entering it twice and creating duplication in the listing.

So basically, you want to recreate something similar to the

<a href="#.."

tag within the block, right? I'm not sure how, but did you you see this? https://www.sanity.io/guides/portable-text-internal-and-external-links ? Maybe you can hack code something together using concepts from this...

Yeah I think that’s the approach I’ll have to go with by creating a seperate “citation” document type and referencing using the same concept as the internal link. I was hoping I’d be able to do this in some way without relying on an “external” document type.

Ah that’s a good point actually, but that would still require manually entering an ID in both the array and a text block right? I can see that being a bit of a hassle to maintain. Regarding the reusability, I’m not 100% sure at this point but I’m thinking it could be handy to have a “library” of citations a user can pick from. Which would lead me down the document path.

So basically, you want to recreate EndNote? 🙂

Do I? hahah I’ve never used it before 🙂

Yeah, basically.

definitely recommend using a document if you’re looking for that sort of functionality!

So basically, each reference is a document. Would this be a custom input type? You could add the reference as a "type" for the portableText WYSIWYG editor and then have them choose it. Finally, you would need a deserializer for whichever front end system will consume it. This would a great input widget to share.

That’s a great suggestion , I’m probably a little too pressed for time to go down the custom input route but that would be a much nicer user experience to be able to create citations at the same time. For now I’ll just have editors create citation documents separately and then link in the portable text editor via a reference to the citation type where appropriate 🙂

thanks for your input all