TYPO3 construct URL with several placeholders - typo3

Question

I am not a developer but I need help talking to my web developer. We have a company website with staff profiles made with TYPO3. On each profile site, we want to embed an URL to a repository website, which will show a list of the person's publications. The URL encodes a SOLR search string for this repository. So, the URL is the same for all staff profiles except for a personal identifier somewhere in the middle. Instead of typing the complete URL into every staff profile page, I would prefer to have a URL constructed with placeholders like this
placeholderA+staffID+placeholderB
In case the SOLR search string changes in the future (i.e. excluding certain document types in this search or changing the sorting) we would have to change only the placeholders, not the complete URL in each and every profile page. There has to be a simple way to do this, but my web developer tells me this would require a database with the staff IDs and a lot of scripting. Is she right? Since we have to touch every profile page to include the URL initially, it would be ok to enter and store the unique staff identifier on each profile page. I just want to avoid touching each page again when changes are required.
It is such a useful concept, there has to be a plugin or something to do this already. Can you throw me some keywords or hints for our next discussion?

Answer 1

How is your URl build?
in general URLs are build in multiple parts
[[[<protocol>]<domain>]<path>[?<parameters>]][#<anchor>]
Now we need to identify where you want to insert the staffID:
is it in <path> or in <parameter>?
In TYPO3 we don't have a real <path>. It's just an image to hide the basic URL index.php with some parameters. first of all the parameter &id=123.
further parameter can occur as parameter or as path segments. Anyway TYPO3 will handle a translation between virtual path and parameters (either an extension like realurl or the core). For URL generation you call TYPO3 providing a list of parameters, or if a 'page' is called you will end with a list of parameters which will decide the rendering.
Then you can mixup the URL generation:
You take a generated URL and add path segments as you 'guess' them, without involving TYPO3. This might result in problems as you will call the server with an url TYPO3 does not know about as it has not generated it. If TYPO3 generates an URL it stores it in the database with the 'translation' into parameters.
realurl can guess the translation, but sometimes it failes, especially if chashes are used.
What are cHashes?
with cHashes TYPO3 secures the page cache against unrelated parameters. If a page is generated it depends on the parameters. Any further parameter might result in another page, so TYPO3 stores a hash of the parameters with each cached page. For verification this hash can be added to the URL. this additional parameter also is stored in the 'translation' table.
If you now add parameters to an URL which is stored and it gets translated back to parameters you have an cHash parameter which identifies the cached page. But only for a part of the parameters. your added parameters were not known and not considered when the page was generated and stored in cache. If the cached page is delivered your additional parameters are 'lost'.
So it is necessary to include all parameters in URL generation with TYPO3.
Your adding of the staffID must be done with TYPO3 and can't be an concatenation of path segments in the HTML templates (or javascript).
If you later on change your parameters you need to change the generation of your URLs.
I would recommend to add the staffID as a field to the record and generate the URL to the document list with TYPO3.