Entry link type should allow selecting entries without URI formats

[apitel]

What are you trying to do?

Description

The Entry link type in Hyper does not display entries from sections that have no Entry URI Format defined. When browsing the element selector modal, selecting a section with no URI format shows "Nothing yet." even though published entries exist in that section.

This appears to be because the Entry link type filters to only show entries that have URIs, since Hyper is primarily a link field. However, there are valid use cases for associating an entry that doesn't have its own URL on the site.

Use Case

We use Hyper as an association field in the Campaign plugin to link newsletter campaign items to related Craft entries. One of our campaign item types is "Research" which links to a Publication Reference structure. These entries store metadata about external academic publications:

• referenceArticleTitle — Title of the published paper
• publicationName — Name of the journal/publication
• referenceArticleLink — External URL to the paper (stored as a field on the entry)

These entries intentionally have no Entry URI Format because they don't have their own pages on our site — they're reference data used across templates. But we still need to associate them via Hyper so the newsletter template can pull in their field data:

{% set element = row.association.getElement() %}
{% if element %}
    <a href="{{ element.referenceArticleLink }}">{{ element.referenceArticleTitle }}</a>
    <p>{{ element.publicationName }}</p>
{% endif %}

Currently this workflow is broken because the Entry link type won't show these entries in the picker at all.

Expected Behavior

The Entry link type element selector should display all published entries from enabled sources, regardless of whether the section has a URI format defined. The entry's URI/URL is not always the reason for the association — sometimes it's about accessing the entry's field data.

What's your proposed solution?

Perhaps an option on the Entry link type settings like "Allow entries without URIs" (default: off for backwards compatibility), or simply always show all entries and let the getUrl() method return null when no URI exists (which callers can already handle).

Additional context

Environment
Craft CMS 5
Hyper (latest)
PHP 8.2

[engram-design]

I generally disagree with this suggestion, and at the very least it should be opt-in. But I can see and appreciate your scenario where you actually want it to happen. We sort of implemented that as a safeguard to content editors, so they can only pick a element that has a link. After all, what's the point in trying to link to something that doesn't produce a link?

But it's also something that's come up a few times.

Updated for the next release. To get this early, run composer require verbb/hyper:"dev-craft-5 as 2.3.3".