[Yi-111-a]

Brief summary

Episode-specific links all land on the podcast item page instead of the episode. /item/:id has no way to address an episode, so every link that knows an episode id still had to throw it away and link to /item/<podcastId>.

This makes those links carry the episode in the query (/item/<podcastId>?episode=<episodeId>) and teaches the item page to open the show notes for the episode named in the query.

Which issue is fixed?

Fixes #5523

The three places the issue lists:

1. The episode title in the currently-playing bar at the bottom (MediaPlayerContainer)
2. The episode cards on the Home shelves — Continue Listening, Newest Episodes, Recently Added, Listen Again (LazyBookCard, via BookShelfCategorized's episode shelves)
3. The episode title in a playlist row (ItemTableRow)

Clicking the play button already started the correct episode, which is why the bug reads as "it plays the episode but the link goes somewhere else".

In-depth Description

Item page (client/pages/item/_id/index.vue)

showEpisodeFromQuery looks the episode up in the already-fetched media.episodes and drives the existing ViewEpisode modal through the store commits the episodes table already uses (setSelectedLibraryItem, globals/setSelectedEpisode, globals/setShowViewPodcastEpisodeModal). It runs on mounted and on a watcher, so /item/li_x?episode=ep_y works on a cold load and when the query changes while the page is open. An unknown id gets a toast instead of a silently dead page, and a non-podcast item ignores the query.

Two follow-on details that the deep link makes necessary:

• The query is stripped again when the modal closes. Without that, the URL keeps ?episode=…, re-clicking the same link changes nothing, and clicking around the same podcast's episodes becomes dead.
• ViewEpisode is a global modal, so beforeDestroy closes it if this page opened it and the user navigated away with it still up, instead of leaving it over the next page.

Link sites

Each one builds the same /item/:id[?episode=…] shape from the episode id it already has in hand — no new plumbing, no server or API change. Non-episode items keep the plain /item/:id.

How have you tested this?

client/cypress/tests/components/cards/LazyBookCard.cy.js gains a when recentEpisode is present block next to the existing when collapsedSeries is present block, asserting the card routes to /item/1?episode=ep-123.

To be straight about the state of this: I have not run the component suite or the app locally. Neither the client toolchain nor a full install fit the disk budget on the machine this was written on, so the Cypress test above is written but unrun, and the reproduction steps are reasoned from the code paths rather than executed. If you would rather take it without the test, say so and I'll drop it.

What I did check: every touched <script> block parses, en-us.json is valid JSON, and the new ToastEpisodeNotFound key is in the alphabetical position the i18n-integration workflow expects.

Reasoning for the three surfaces, for review convenience — the item page's asyncData already fetches ?expanded=1, so media.episodes is present on mount and the lookup needs no extra request; LazyEpisodeRow.clickedEpisode and LazyEpisodesTable.viewEpisode are the two existing callers of this modal and the new code reuses their exact three store commits; and ViewEpisode is rendered once in layouts/default.vue, so it is already mounted on the item page.

Suggested manual pass: open an episode from each of the three surfaces and check the modal shows that episode; confirm the play button still starts it; confirm an unknown ?episode= id toasts; confirm Home shelf cards for non-episodes and ordinary book/playlist rows still go to the plain item page; and confirm closing the modal then re-clicking the same link reopens it.

Screenshots

N/A — routing plus the existing episode modal, no visual change.

[nichwall]

Thanks for opening a PR, but no frontend changes are being reviewed or merged due to the ongoing React rewrite.

[Yi-111-a]

Understood — thanks for the heads-up about the React rewrite. Closing this out so it doesn't sit in the review queue; happy to revisit once frontend changes are being accepted again.