URL Rewriting

[amcd78]

Hi

We're looking of implementing a URL rewriting funciton on our site, however, we are currently hosted on shared servers, and are therefore not able to install any objects or filters.

We are hosted on a .Net server, therefore does this seem a feasible option: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/de...lrewriting.asp

Is there a better option, I should be looking at instead?

Enjoy your weekend
Alastair

[Retail-Therapy]

Alastair if you can't install anything on the server, the microsoft article is about building your own isapi url rewriting filter, so is no good to you.

Theres no way round it if you can't install a filter.

If you can (I have requested hosting companies to install filters and they have), then there are two extremely robust possibilities, both from Helicontech Isapi_Rewrite and LinkFreeze

The best thing to do is, move hosts, get Apache and Linux with rewriting enabled, its all plain sailing (-ish) from there.

Tony

[Barry]

Do you have access to changing the location of the 404 page?

If so you 'may' (depending on how the server is set up) be able to write your own url rewriting script.

[Retail-Therapy]

url rewriting based around a 404 is probably not a good thing to do, its a 'page not found' error code, so the url rewriting (unless its not for SE purposes) won't get you anywhere. The 404 header will have been set by IIS before the custom error page displays.

Tony

[jonspivey]

Hi,
Probably the easiest way to do url rewrites in asp.net is to stick some code in Application_BeginRequest to read in the url and rewrite it. For an example lets say you have pages fed from a database, you want to make links like this

http://you.com/1234.aspx (where 1234 is a product ID) and then rewrite to
http://you.com/showproduct.aspx?id=1234
you could do something like this

Sub Application_BeginRequest(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
Dim incoming As HttpContext = HttpContext.Current
Dim str As String = incoming.Request.Path.ToLower
Dim product As Match = Regex.Match(str, "\d\d\d\d")
If product.Success Then
incoming.RewritePath("/ShowProduct.aspx?id=" & product.Value)
End If
End Sub

Obviously that's simple - you could make this as complex as you need. There's 1 drawback with this, or any other url rewrite method, that only requests for .aspx pages will actually reach the aspx engine so while you can easily rewrite http://you.com/1234.aspx you couldn't rewrite something like http://you.com/1234 as this request would throw a 404 in IIS before it even reached asp.net. The only way around this would be to set every page request to go through asp.net (not a good idea and almost certainly disallowed by shared hosts)

The other option may be to use a custom 404 page in IIS - bear in mind this could be viable because IIS does NOT send a 404 response code if you have a custom 404 page set up - so the search engines will not be aware they're going through a 404.

Cheers,
Jon