Come together with the global Drupal community in Rotterdam, 28 Sept – 1 Oct 2026. Sessions, contribution, connection, and Early Bird savings until 8 June.an automatic path is not being created.
"Automatic alias" is checked. It says "An alias will be generated for you." but when I submit the page I get the error "The path is already in use".
Comments
Comment #1
gregglesI guess this is a known problem - http://drupal.org/node/51684
Can you confirm if that solves the problem for you? If so perhaps we can do something to try to fix it.
Comment #2
nick@guillemot-kayaks.com commentedThanks. Yes, that fixed it.
My url_alias table contained a blank alias.
Since this error has occurred more than once, may I suggest that an inelegant solution would be that when the alias field is left blank that Pathauto should assume a new alias is desired instead of giving an error.
Comment #3
gregglesI agree we should fix it, but I'd rather fix the original bug: allowing a blank alias.
Comment #4
nick@guillemot-kayaks.com commentedFWIW - I first got this problem after installing the Devel module. I did what I needed with Devel and then turned it off. It was some time after this that I noticed the blank alias problem.
Well, I just turned Devel back on to do something, and then turned it off again. I re-experienced the blank alias problem.
I wonder if anyone else can reproduce the problem in the same manner?
Comment #5
dgp commentedI had the exact same problem (a blank 'dst' field in the url_alias table), and again, it was an Acidfree node. This is a bug in Acidfree, although clearly it could be blocked by a patch to Pathauto to refuse to create blank aliases.
Comment #6
joachim commentedI'm seeing this with the latest version on D6.
I have not set a pattern for page nodes, nor have I set a default pattern.
This means that pathauto creates a blank alias for a new page node, which then leads to 'already in use' errors for subsequent node creation.
Comment #7
joachim commentedVery strange -- I can't reproduce this on my development site.
I got this problem on a production site, so I don't know exactly what caused the blank alias to be created.
Comment #8
dave reidI haven't ever seen this error and Pathauto has explicit check to prevent an empty alias from being written. Marking as fixed. If you can re-produce with just a fresh core install + latest Pathauto code, please change the status back to active.