I'm using the old 404-rewrite method on a certain site that is tied to IIS6 *.
So if I enter
http://example.com/non-existent/path
it calls my error page like so
http://example.com/catch.aspx?404;http://example.com/non-existent/path
Great.
Except if I call the page with a fragment, like
http://example.com/non-existent/path#with-fragment
I get the same result as above. I can't find the fragment anywhere:
Request.Url
Request.Url.OriginalString
Request.UrlReferrer
Request.RawUrl
headers, server variables, etc
This has come up because I want to resolve paths created by AJAX to their server-side versions.
Is there any way for me to retrieve the original path from my handler?
Thanks.
(*) Please don't suggest I change platform. Obviously I would if I could.
No, there isn't.
The portion of URL after # is never passed to the server per HTTP spec. Has nothing to do with platform.
To work with info after # in javascript you should look at Javascript History plugins/functionality. jQuery has history plugin, asp.net ajax and mvc ajax (partial views et al) have that. Mind you, it's not a very easy thing to implement, you have to get into undo/redo mindset.
It probably won't work if you are trying to handle 404's on the server - server doesn't know that there was something after #. Not sure what you want to do though, 404 handling, or "resolve paths created by AJAX"? What exactly is the goal?
Related
In my MVC3 application, I'm using Application_AuthenticateRequest to create my custom user context and create the session. However, I notice that this is getting fired for every file per page request, including images, js, css, etc.
Is this the right method to do what I'm trying to do, or should I be doing this somewhere else (i.e. action filter)? Or, is this the right place, I just need to put some checks and/or configuration to ensure this method (or my block of code) is just executed for page requests instead of requests for static files?
I searched for a while trying to find the answer, and found one specific to IIS7, but this is happening for me on my ASP.NET dev server (debugging) on WinXP. Other than that, I couldn't find much, which leads me to think I may be way off on something here, possibly overlooking something simple.
Thanks in advance.
Jerad,
You are correct that you would be better off creating an action filter to handle your user context. You can decorate those controllers where the user context is required.
This is a better solution than using code to investigate the request, just so you can ignore particular requests.
counsellorben
I posted a query for 301-redirect using ASP.NET 3.5 here:
Redirecting default.aspx to root virtual directory
Based on the replies I got there, I realized there might be a bug in ASP.NET's Request.RawUrl method which is unable to return the actual raw url (without /default.aspx) when being used in a sub-directory, i.e. the /default.aspx page is inside a subdirectory.
Can someone please shed some light on this possible bug?
Thanks,
Asif
i found a good explanation here
http://codeasp.net/blogs/vivek_iit/microsoft-net/873/301-redirect-from-default-aspx-to-site-root
Thanks
If you suspect this is a bug, then the place to go is Microsoft Connect, where you can report and discuss the bug directly with Microsoft.
Edit: I was able to reproduce the look per your comments.
I was unable to reproduce the infinite loop, however. I injected code into the Global.asax Application_BeginRequest handler of a web application and got the expected behavior of a single redirect.
There are other, and IMO much better, options for handling global redirect rules. On IIS7, I use the URL Rewrite module to configure rewrite rules in IIS. You can read more about it and download it here: http://www.iis.net/download/urlrewrite. The appeal of a solution such as this is that you can customize and update your rewrite rules without recompiling the application.
Edit: I was able to retrieve the raw URL without the default.aspx (after the redirect) by using instead:
Request.ServerVariables["CACHE_URL"]
It's worth a shot.
Have you looked at the IIS settings for your virtual directory? If there is a default document set to default.aspx then this will explain the infinite loop that you are experiencing. You are telling the website to redirect to the virtual directory without the "default.aspx" and IIS is detecting this on the next request and putting it back in ad infinitum.
Right click your virtual directory, select Properties and then the Documents tab. If default.aspx is in the list then that is what you will get. The Url of the request will be passed to the ASP.NET worker process as /folder/default.aspx rather than /folder/
This is not a bug. If IIS didn't do this, you would get a page not found error.
Sounds to me like you need to investigate URL rewriting: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx
In my research, I found 2 ways to do them.
Both required modifications to the Application_BeginRequest procedure in the Global.Asax, where you would run your code to do the actual URL mapping (mine was with a database view that contained all the friendly URLs and their mapped 'real' URLs). Now the trick is to get your requests run through the .NET engine without an aspx extension. The 2 ways I found are:
Run everything through the .NET engine with a wildcard application extension mapping.
Create a custom aspx error page and tell IIS to send 404's to it.
Now here's my question:
Is there any reason one of these are better to do than the other?
When playing around on my dev server, the first thing I noticed about #1 was it botched frontpage extensions, not a huge deal but that's how I'm used to connecting to my sites. Another issue I have with #1 is that even though my hosting company is lenient with me (as I'm their biggest client) and will consider doing things such as this, they are wary of any security risks it might present.
`#2 works great, but I just have this feeling it's not as efficient as #1. Am I just being delusional?
Thanks
I've used #2 in the past too.
It's more efficient because unlike the wildcard mapping, the ASP.NET engine doesn't need to 'process' requests for all the additional resources like image files, static HTML, CSS, Javascript etc.
Alternatively if you don't mind .aspx extension in your URL's you could use: http://myweb/app/idx.aspx/products/1 - that works fine.
Having said that, the real solution is using IIS 7, where the ASP.NET runtime is a fully fledged part of the IIS HTTP module stack.
If you have the latest version of IIS there is rewrite module for it - see here. If not there are free third party binaries you can use with older IIS (i.e. version 6) - I have used one that reads the rewrite rules from an .ini file and supports regular expression but I cant remember its name sorry (its possibly this). I'd recommend this over cheaping it out with the 404 page.
You have to map all requests through the ASP.NET engine. The way IIS processes requests is by the file extension. By default it only processes the .aspx, .ashx, etc extensions that are meant to only be processed by ASP.NET. The reason is it adds overhead to the processing of the request.
I wrote how to do it with IIS 6 a while back, http://professionalaspnet.com/archive/2007/07/27/Configure-IIS-for-Wildcard-Extensions-in-ASP.NET.aspx.
You are right in doing your mapping from the database. RegEx rewriting, like is used out of the box in MVC. This is because it more or less forces you to put the primary key in the URL and does not have a good way to map characters that are not allowed in URLs, like '.
Did you checked the ASP .Net MVC Framework? Using that framework all your URLs are automatically mapped to Controllers which could perform any desired action (including redirecting to other URLs or controllers). You could also set custom routes with custom parameters. If you don't have seen it yet, maybe it will worth the look.
I have an ASP.Net application which generates short url for sharing. I want to track the url from where (source) click occured when it hits my asp.net page. I tried using Context.Request.UrlReferrer.AbsoluteUri but all I get from it is null.
Any ideas?
TIA
Don't forget that the referrer will sometimes be null for things like search engines, or people behind corporate firewalls that remove some HTTP headers.
Not quite as clean, but you could use Request.Headers["Referer"]. Should be the same as using Context.Request, but I've found the behavior to be different.
Is there a simple and foolproof way we can test an AJAX installation? We have a problem in calling a webscript using AJAX form a JS file. The error is 'ServiceLib' is not defined. The error gets a few hits on Google.
We've added some AJAX functionality to a customer's app. This works fine here in the office on dev machines and on our IIS Server, it works fine on the customer's test web site, but when we put the app on the live site, the webscript calls fail.
The customer installed AJAX on their live server a few days ago. We've verified that the service lib files are there and in the right places.
We've already spent hours on this with no solution and still do not know for sure whether there is something wrong with our code, or something is wrong on their server, or for that matter, whether AJAX is even correctly installed. Part of our problem is that we have no access to their live server, so there is not much we can do other than change lines in our own code, give the app files to our contact there, and see what happens. The contact knows less than we do, so we are working blind. A strange situation, I know, but there is beaurocracy involved.
Many thanks
Mike Thomas
Firebug might help - if you can get someone at the far end to install it, it may be able to give you an insight into what is going on with the ajax requests via its console, which logs and gives you the ability to view the return data of all ajax requests.
I'm thinking...
There are three parts to the process:
1) The client-side javascript logic in the browser sends the HTTP request to the server.
2) The server-side ASP.NET page processes it and responds.
3) The client-side logic receives the response and updates the web page, or whatever.
Swap out each part with something simpler and diagnostic to see where in the pipeline the break is.
For example, create a diagnostic webpage that's a substitue for #1 that calls the server-side page directly.
If that seems to work, create a different server-side ASP.NET page that's very simple, just logs something, to prove that the real #1 does what your diagnostic #1 did.
Ya know, your standard debugging binary search...