URL Rewrite in IIS - iis-7

Question

Whenever a request
http://localhost:9000/Content/PDF/ABC.pdf
comes (in IIS), i want URL rewrite module to process that request and redirect it to
http://localhost:9000/User/GetPdf
so that my controller and action methods are invoked and my code gets executed before a pdf file is shown to end user.
Here User is UserController and GetPdf is an ActionMethod in my application.
Can any body tell me steps to create this URL rewrite.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm assuming you are using IIS 7.x and you have installed URL Rewrite 2.0 module.
In your application's web.config file, add a <rewrite> element similar to:
<system.webServer>
<rewrite>
<rules>
<rule name="PDF Rewrite">
<match url="Content/PDF/([\w-]+)\.pdf" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="User/GetPdf/{R:1}" logRewrittenUrl="true" />
</rule>
</rules>
</rewrite>
</system.webServer>
The ([\w-]+) portion of url="Content/PDF/([\w-]+)**\.pdf" will "capture" the name of the PDF ("ABC" in your example) without the file extension. The {R:1} portion of <action type="Rewrite" url="User/GetPdf/{R:1}" logRewrittenUrl="true" /> will then insert the captured string. The net result is that:
http://localhost:9000/Content/PDF/ABC.pdf
becomes:
http://localhost:9000/User/GetPDF/ABC
I am assuming that you will need to pass in the name of the PDF to your Action method, so if you implement the standard routing pattern {Controller}/{Action}/{id}, then the id will be set to "ABC".
The best introduction to the URL Rewrite module that I have found is actually the URL Rewrite 1.1 configuration reference. Even though it is for v.1.1 rather than 2.0, it provides a better overview than the v.2.0 Configuration Reference. It is worth reading from the start. In particular, one must understand the “Accessing URL Parts from a Rewrite Rule” section.
To debug the URL Rewrite module, you can use the IIS 7.x "Failed Request Tracing," which, contrary to its name, can be used to trace successful as well as failed requests. This www.iis.net entry illustrates how to configure this and amount of detailed debugging information that is available.
Also note that the logRewrittenUrl="true" attribute means that the rewritten URL will be logged to the standard IIS log instead of the original URL. (It can't be used to log both the original and the rewritten URL--- you can only get one or the other.)