I have a page as part of my IIS 7 (ASP.NET) website which serves images from a database. It uses a querystring to select the image and sets the content type header appropriately (image/jpeg) so that, for example, image.aspx?ID=1234 will be displayed in the browser as a jpeg image.
What I want to do instead is offer a URI formed in a manner such as image/1234.jpg which will produce the same result. In other words, there is no actual file on the server named 1234.jpg, it's just the contents of a database record, but from the browser's perspective, it will appear as if there is such a file.
I'm sure this is possible, but I can't figure out how it's accomplished, or where to look for answers. I'm thinking it may be done with an ISAPI filter, but I haven't found an accessible path into the docs to know if that's even the correct basis for a solution.
Possibly the best option here would be to implement a URL rewrite rule that changes image/1234.jpg to image.aspx?ID=1234
You can find more on URL rewrite for IIS here.
If, for whatever reason, URL rewrite isn't an option to you, then another possible method might be to implement a custom 404 page. When your request to image/1234.jpg doesn't result in a real file, it'll end up there.
You should be able to detect the URI at that point and serve up the image.
Related
Many websites do not allow directory browsing. They want you to navigate from and in the webpages of that site. So for example if the page contains an image, you can only view the image by loading the whole page. When you paste the image location into the browser, you get the 403. Same situation when you try to access that image using URLConnection.
My question is, is there anyway to work around this? I.E. trick the server into thinking that our java access request comes from the page (knowing the url of the page that contains the item we want to access)?
Thanks,
Peter.
You can spoof the referer. It is used by servers showing this behaviour to know if you've come from eg a search engine.
http://www.jguru.com/faq/view.jsp?EID=257742 shows one implementation of it in Java.
I have a currently existing site with URL re-writing enabled using ISAPI Rewrite and IIRF files, the problem is it's causing a lot of problems, both for site development / maintenance and because of continuous errors on the server.
Because of this I'm looking to replace it with .Net 4.0's URL Routing.
I'm having two problems with this, first, the current routing rules are set up so that the page being routed to is simply the re-written URL with the file extension appended to the end.
So www.site.com/page/ would become www.site.com/page.aspx
The second problem is that certain re-written URL's actually point to physical files within sub-folders on the website using the same logic as above.
So www.site.com/folder/page/ would redirect to www.site.com/folder/page.aspx
I've read through this article and created custom IRouteHandler and IHttpHander implemented classes, but I'm not really sure where to go from here.
I've tried a few different things, mainly related to variables in the URL and trying to redirect to them, but I'm not sure that's the right way for me to go.
I'm not posting code because all I have at the moment is pretty much the example code from the link above.
I've implemented basic routing on another site where a single page uses a variable in the URL to grab the relevant content out of a database, and that seemed simple enough, but this is making my head spin, I'm sure it shouldn't be this complicated.
The situation is the following: I created a site with Plone, developed, used, but behind a test URL. Now it has to be published, but the test URL is not appropriate and I don't want to move the site. I think, if I use a redirect, it won't be appear in the URL-bar, only in the case of site start page. Am I wrong? (The test URL should not be used, because it will be a "semi-official" site.) What do you suggest to do?
As far as I can see Plone uses absolute URLs everywhere. I can add relative URLs, but if I create a new page, a new event, etc., then they have absolute URLs on other automatically generated inner pages. Is there any way to convert these URLs to relative paths? Is there any setting possibilty where only a checkbox changes this default setting?
Plone does not store your URLs in the database. It uses the inbound host header (and any virtual hosting configuration set up with rewrite rules in Apache or Nginx) to calculate the correct absolute URL when rendering the page.
In other words - as soon as you actually point the relevant domain name to the server with your Plone instance, it'll just work.
P.S.
You should put a bit more effort into asking your question. This is just a copy and paste of a half-finished email chain where you tried to get the answer from me in private. It's not very easy to understand what you're asking.
I think what you are looking for is url rewriting to handle virtual hosting. ie to get your site to appear as if it's the root url of a domain.
This is normally done via the webserver that normally sits in front of plone. For apache, here is a howto
http://plone.org/documentation/kb/plone-apache/virtualhost
for other servers
http://plone.org/documentation/manual/plone-community-developer-documentation/hosting
You can also achieve this directly in zope (via ZMI) using something called the Virtual Host
Monster. see http://docs.zope.org/zope2/zope2book/VirtualHosting.html
PS. I don't think your question is badly worded. Plone does serve pages with a "base" tag and what appears to be absolute urls. They aren't baked into the database but it's also not obvious that the solution to getting the url you want is the VHM url syntax and a proxying frontend webserver. There is a reason why it doesn't use relative urls... which I can't remember it was so long ago.
Had a question from a client which stumped me.
They are using IIS 6.0 and for some reason, instead of making a normal request for a page on their server which I'll call www.domain.com/Default.aspx someone typed www.domain.com/Default.aspx/randomstuff
It seems that IIS's response was to serve Default.aspx as normal, but, as far as the browser is concerned, the path is www.domain.com/Default.aspx/ rather than www.domain.com/ and thus all relative paths to CSS, images, etc. fail
I looked at the traffic in Fiddler, and it seems that all of those image etc. requests, such as www.domain.com/Default.aspx/images/image.gif are ALSO returning the contents of Default.aspx, needless to say, not a valid image!
I don't believe they are doing anything special with URL rewriting, but just to be sure, I tried an experiment on a freshly created ASP.NET web application and the results were the same.
So what is causing IIS to pass a URL like /Default.aspx/randomstuff to the ASP.NET pipeline as a request for Default.aspx? And can it be stopped, and made to just throw a 404 as you'd expect?
This is called the PathInfo component.
You can stop like this:
if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(Request.PathInfo)) throw new HttpException(404);
Yes, that's perfectly normal. Apache will do it too.
You can use it for routing, so you can have the URL /script.name/random/stuff instead of /script.name?page=random§ion=stuff without having to set up URL rewriting.
Naturally the browser doesn't know that script.name is the real script, that random and stuff aren't really part of the path at the server-side. So all URLs will be relative to the random directory. Normally when you are writing an application with routing, you have to make sure you use rooted or absolute URLs through rather than relative URLs, for this reason.
And can it be stopped, and made to just throw a 404 as you'd expect?
Yes, as in SLaks's answer. However it would probably be better to send a 301 to the real address without the trailing Path Info parts.
Sites like cnn.com or foxnews.com.
Where do they store all the articles? In html files? In database?
More logically to store everything in DB but how to generate a static link to something that is inside DB?
It's not that they have a a dynamic page load like: LoadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=123, every article has it's own address.
Please explain how this is done.
They use a special content management library called VoodooLib.dll.
Seriously, when you write something to a database, you normally generate some kind of unique identifier - 123, for example. It gets permanently associated with that record (article content). After that it is used to generate the same id as part of an Url at any time later.
As for the static link, it is a simple matter of Url Rewriting.
You generate static links to display on a page because they work much better for SEO. When a request for that static Url hits the server, it gets substituted for something "server friendly" and then gets to be processed.
They probably use some form of Content Management System (CMS). There are many different ones out there - most store the actual content in a database or as XML (some store XML in a database). They will the either publish that content as static HTML pages or, more commonly now, as dynamic pages that are cached. Many use what are known as "friendly URLs" that are virtual addresses that are mapped to the actual physical file path using URL-rewriting techniques.
Note you can't tell whether a page is dynamic or static simply from the extension. It is quite possible to have dynamic pages that end in the .html extension.
Just because the URL looks "static" doesn't mean it is; they could be using something like mod_rewrite or an IIS ISAPI to make the URLs more search engine friendly.
For the high-volume news sites that you mention, however, they may very well generate the pages statically in order to prevent overloading the database with repeated requests for the same article.
Look at the URl of this page, it doesn't have xxx.aspx?some-query-string
You are refering to using friendly URLs.
To do something like that, one common way is to use URL Rewrite and/or some custom HTTPModule
Here's a good reference: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx
Just because a page has a normal URL does not mean that it isn't serving dynamic content. With the Apache mod_rewrite module, it is possible to manipulate URLs. So, for example, a page like http://www.domain.tld/permalink/12345/message-title-slug can be converted internally to http://www.domain.tld/permalink/index.php?id=12345&slug=message-title-slug.
I do not know exactly what cnn.com and foxnews.com use, but I would bet that they use a Content Management System (CMS) which serves all pages dynamically, with the content stored either in a database or on the filesystem, and with authoring/publishing all being performed through the particular CMS.
Just checking cnn.com, the article links have in them
Year
Location (US or WORLD/specificlocationid)
Month
Day
Article name.
All of this information together can be used to uniquely identify any article (even less of it is probably actually needed). The dynamic content loading page address could easily be hidden by some method of URL rewriting, and then the information in the requested URL is used to determine which article in the DB is to be served up.
I don't know why all the other answerers seem to assume that some form of URL rewriting is necessary to create friendly URLs. It's not true at all.
It's perfectly possible to write web serving code that splits a URL into parameters - eg year, month, title - and pass that directly to the code that gets the content from the database, without any need to rewrite the URL. Most modern web frameworks such as Django and Rails include this functionality out of the box.
This is done through mod-rewrite techniques.
Here's an article about the mod rewriting engine: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html
And here's their "guide": http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
I hope that helps. It should make for a good starting point. Goodluck.