IIS URL Rewrite for Clean URLs - iis-7

Question

I am working on a site that uses IIS. I have it working to remove extensions but then I was informed that the client was everything removed after the trailing slash.
I first thought this might not be possible with URL Rewrite, but then again I don't know much about IIS.
Basically if anyone browses the site and clicks on an interior page the url should stay the same, the top level domain.
http://www.example.com instead of http://www.example.com/whatever
this is what I have so far to remove the extension.
<rule name="Remove PHP Extension">
<match url="(.*)\.php" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="{R:1}" />
</rule>
<rule name="Remove PHP Extension">
<match url=".*" negate="false" />
<conditions>
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
<add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
<add input="{URL}" pattern="(.*)\.(.*)" negate="true" />
</conditions>
<action type="Rewrite" url="{R:0}.php" />
</rule>
Any help would be greatly appreciated
Thanks

Answer 1

Doing it via IIS may be difficult since each link would actually have to navigate the user to the page in the first instance. And then you're stuck, unless you then redirect to the homepage and then perform a rewrite based upon the referrer - which is all a bit nuts.
Instead, you could use an javascript/jquery approach which may be better. Something like:
$('a').on('click', function(ev){
ev.preventDefault();
$('body').load($(this).attr('href'));
})
This would take any anchor and override it ensuring th the content was loaded into the current page.
Admittedly, this is without any conditional checks for the href pointing to an page id etc. and also falls short when considering you may already have ajax calls in tht esite.
It also doesn't take into consideration forms submittals, but you could work this in.
Another problem with this is what would happen if someone navigated to a page directly.
A final approach would be to load the entire site into an Iframe. Nasty but apprpiate if that is the effect the client wants. You could have some javascript on each page that forced itself into an iframe if it wasn't already.
Whichever approach you take, your client can kiss goodbye to any search rankings. Which reminds me, don't forget to disallow all in your robots.txt