Configurable "Autolink" Rendering Transformation

If XWiki is used for development documentation, often special keywords representing uplink ticket system / issue tracking system entries and similar will be used.

It would be very convenient it these could automatically and transparently be converted into links to the corresponding ticket pages in the remote ticket systems.

An example is how e.g. Jira automatically links issue keys like XRENDERING-731 directly to the corresponding issue.

This was asked and discussed in the Xwiki forum quite a while ago.

For e.g. the Mattermost chat system, there's a community supported "autolink" plugin which can be configured using regular expression "search and replace" patterns and will transform the text once before it's sent to the users / written to the database.

In Xwiki, according to the forum discussion linked above, this approach could be done using event listeners, or alternatively a rendering transformation like the WikiWord rendering transformation could be implemented which always performs this "seach and replace" on demand whenever the page is displayed (which will cause more computation overhead over time, but would allow to re-adjust URLs once ticket systems move to other servers / domains).

Depending on how powerful these patterns / rules are, it may even be imaginable to link file names or class names directly to their GitHub / GitLab / whatever web browser views.