Navigation Link block keeps reference of post ID it was created with after URL gets changed

[fabiankaegy]

When you add a new navigation link block it technically also adds the id/postTyoe of the post/page it is linking to. This is used determine the active variation etc.

<!-- wp:navigation-link {"label":"XXX","type":"page","id":123,"url":"http://xxx.xx/xxx/","kind":"post-type"} /-->

The problem is that there is no way to unlink that navigation link block from that original post that was selected. And the ID also stays there.

So if you go into an existing navigation, update all the links and labels and then at some point delete/unpublish the original post with the ID that is still in the attributes, the navigation item will not get shown on the frontend anymore. This is because core rightly so wants to not show draft posts in the navigation.

The solution here would be to remove the id attribute when the URL gets manually changed by the user

[fabiankaegy]

@getdave curious to get your take on this one here 🤔 Do you think it would be fine to remove the id & postType attributes when the user manually updates the URL?

[getdave]

Closely connected to #18345 which is on the Tracking Issue.

Yes if a new value gets submitted then a new id should be set as an attribute 👍

[Andrew-Starr]

Just wanted to note that this also applies to the Navigation Submenu block, and also taxonomy objects in the 'kind' attribute.

[getdave]

In general the Link and Submenu blocks probably need to find ways to reuse the same core code. Duplicating features manually is challenging at best and at worst produces a lot of inconsistencies between the blocks.

@draganescu as a long time contributor to the Editor project, I wonder have you encountered any blocks which share code between them?