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.
Related
I'm experimenting with using MVC routing as a temporary fix to get SEO friendly urls on an old (VB6/ASP classic) system while it's being re-written (which will take a long time).
The old system has 1 asp file with a vb6 dll that generates html which is served by a response.write in the master.asp.
so urls on that system look like this:
www.foo.com/master.asp?sessionid=abc123&pagetype=Item&ItemID=My-widget
I'm wondering if I can use an MVC project to create a route for cleaner urls
and have a controller map the values and build the corresponding old url and then do a Server.Transfer to it.
So the new url would look like:
www.foo.com/Item/My-widget
and map to the old url at
www.foo.com/master.asp?sessionid=abc123&pagetype=Item&ItemID=My-widget
both could then be used interchangeably so the existing site doesn;t have to change, but I could use the new cleaner url on external sites for better SEO
Is this possible?
Is there another way to do this?
edit:
since it's not possible to use server.transfer from MVC, I'm now considering using routing in an ASP.net webforms app.
This should allow me to get the routing part of the application done. Will post back here once I've tried it.
I would suggest you use UrlRewriter.net library instead. It has a lot more features than the the built-in Routing framework (including Regex support), support for permanent redirects, and it's all configurable in the web.config file.
I've tried to use Routing before for this sort of thing but found that it became quite limiting very quickly.
http://urlrewriter.net/
Edit: you will still need a .net web project "wrapper" for your classic asp solution though, as you describe in your question, which of course comes with it's own problems as outlined in the other answers.
I cant think of a way that you could do this, but you might have some luck with the url rewriter module in iis: http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/
I think this could be made to work, but it doesn't sound ideal. I suspect you'd run into some issues with sharing data between the two sessions too. It may be a good idea IF you are planning to migrate to .net, and the app will be running in a "half and half" state for a while (if so I'd suggest introducing a managed core library shared between both sides before worrying about url rewrites).
I haven't done much work with classic ASP lately, but I think this post on URL Rewriting in Classic ASP might be helpful to you.
ASP.net 4.0 / IIS7.
I want to "alias" a single web form to appear as various extensionless urls. Given a form in my web root called "mySite.com/ColorWebForm456.aspx":
I want it served as multiple names, e.g., mySite.com/Color, mySite.com/Colour, mySite.com/Colors, mySite.com/Coler, etc., without creating folders and duplicate forms with those names.
I never want mySite.com/ColorWebForm456.aspx displayed in the browser, it needs to display as mySite.com/Color, even if the user somehow acquires it and types in that exact ~.aspx address.
The variations will account for several alternate or mis-spellings users might attempt - I don't want them "corrected", however. So, if a user types in mySite.com/Colour, the url is NOT rewritten to mySite.com/Color, but the same page is served via ColorWebForm456.aspx as the requested "mySite.com/Colour".
I've seen so many articles on this that I'm not even sure where this would be best handled: in Global.asax, IIS7 URL Rewrite, web.config, etc., and I'm not even sure this is technically a case of url rewriting or routing... ?
You can achieve this with ASP.NET 4 routing for web forms, or if you are using MVC its available too: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/13/url-routing-with-asp-net-4-web-forms-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx
Except potentially for #3; it would work, but you would have to explicitly declare the variations you want. In that case, rewriting supports regular expression matching, so that might be better for what you are looking for.
I had issues setting up URL rewriting and various aspects of web forms, so be aware. There is some setup required for a rewrite module potentially (I could have done it wrong too), where URL routing is already built in and handled.
HTH.
If you have a rewrite engine available:
(using ISAPI Rewrite .htaccess syntax)
# redirect any requests for the filename back to the friendly URL
RewriteRule ^/colorWebForm4567.aspx(.*) /Color$1 [NC,R=302]
# rewrite /Color requests to the web form
RewriteRule ^/(Color|Colour)/(.*) /ColorWebForm4567.aspx$2
Following article expalins it all, but if you will be using a web host after you complete your application I would check with the hosting provider first to see if they are offering everything you need to have:
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/496/iis-url-rewriting-and-aspnet-routing/
Hope this helps!
As a side note: Search engines dislike it, if you publish content under different URLs ("duplicate content").
So my recommendation would be to stick with one (rewritten) URL, not multiple (rewritten) URLs for the same content.
I've seen a lot of dynamic website through the internet that their pages are in html or htm format . I don't get it why is that ? And how they do that ?
Just look at this website : http://www.realmadrid.com/cs/Satellite/en/Home.htm
What you see in the URL can be set at will by the people running the web site. The technique is called URL rewriting.
How
On Apache, the most popular solution to that is the mod_rewrite module.
Seeing as you've tagged ASP.NET: As far as I know, ASP.NET has only limited rewriting support out of the box. This blog entry promises a complete URL rewriting solution in ASP 2.0
Why
As for the why, there is no compelling technical reason to do this.
It's just that htm and html are the recognized standard extensions for HTML content, and many (including myself) think they simply look nicer than .php, .php5, .asp, .aspx and so on.
Also, as Adam Pope points out in his answer, this makes it less obvious which server side technology/language is used.
The .html/.htm extension has the additional effect that if you save it to disk, it is usually automatically connected with your installed browser.
Maybe (a very big maybe) there are very stupid simple client programs around that recognize that they have to parse HTML by looking at the extension. But that would be a blatant violation of rules and was hopefully last seen in 1994. Anyway, I don't think this is the case any more.
There are a number of potential reasons, these may include:
They could be trying to hide the technology they built the site with
They could be serving a cached version of a page which was written out to HTML.
They could simply perceive it to look friendlier to the user
They might be using a server-side scripting language like PHP or ASP. You can configure what file extensions get parsed by the language by editing the web server configuration files.
For example in PHP the default extension is .php but you could configure the server to use .html, that would mean any files with the .html extension could contain PHP code they would get parsed before the page is sent to the clients web browser.
This is generally not recommend as it adds an overhead and .html pages that don't have any PHP would be parsed by the PHP engine anyway which is slower then serving pages direct to the browser.
The other way would be to use some form of URL rewriting. See URL Rewriting in ASP.NET
Another reason is SEO(Search engine optimization). Many search engines like html pages and many guys（I mean some SEO specialists) think the html can improve the rank of their content in search engine.
One possibility is just historical reasons. Pages that started static, now are generated dynamically, but sites don't want to break old customer's favorites.
They keep some pages as html because their content is not supposed to change frequently or not at all.
But you should also keep in mind the fact that some sites are dynamic but they change the page extention to html but original page remains same eg php or aspx, etc using htaccess or some frameworks like codeigniter etc.
So, I know there's a lot of this subject here and over the Internet. But most articles/questions refers to "static" url rewriting, like:
www.site.com/products.aspx?category=Books
So they rewrite it to
www.site.com/Products/Books
That's ok but I need something else.
The site is like a CMS, it has different types of content.
Nowadays to read the article titled "How StackOverflow helps you in your development" you need to go to an URL like the following.
www.site.com/viewContent.aspx?Id=1234
What I want to achive is:
www.site.com/Content/Articles/how-to-stackoverflow-helps-you-in-your-development
So as I understand, I need to involve ASP .NET in that, because first I need to retrieve the article (an its title of course) and then rewrite the URL.
But I'm wondering how the hell ASP .NET will know how to get that article if I go to that URL, it doesn't include the id anywhere...
So maybe I could accept something like
www.site.com/Content/Articles/1234/how-to-stackoverflow-helps-you-in-your-development
I'm kind of lost here really.. I've never done any URL Rewriting at all and I've googled a lot and I cannot find a way to do what I want. Maybe what I want is not called url rewriting??? I don't know...
The site is running under Windows 2003 Server, IIS6, ASP .NET 3.5 SP1
And of course, I need a free solution, cannot spend 100usd on the ISAPI mod (besides I don't know if that is going to do what I need).
Thanks to all and sorry if this is a duplicated question, but I couldn't find it.
EDIT: I don't need to support non-ASP.NET files (jpgs, gifs, etc) don't need to be rewritten. I just need to rewrite the viewContent page to include the content title into the URL.
You can use the new Routing that comes with ASP.Net 3.5 sp1 to have clean URLs.
This can even be done in web forms and not just MVC. ( I have done it myself). See here and here for exanples of how to set it up.
You can throw the Id of the article and the title in the URL and make the Id the real parameter that gets used to search for the article. That is what SO does. Try removing the question for the URL and it will take you to the same place.
Even if you don't use the Id you can pass the title of the article "how-to-stackoverflow-helps-you-in-your-development" to your DB and retreive the article based on the title.
With regards to IIS 6 it is a little trickier since IIS 6 by default can't handle extension-less URL's.
There are a few work arounds:
Use the wildcard mapping in IIS to map all requests to Asp.Net
Put Default.aspx at the end of your urls
See this post for other possible solutions.
Although the first solution may have performance issues if all content in your site goes through Asp.Net (even images, css, .html ...) in a small site it shouldn't matter. I have used this approach and there wasn't any major performance issues. I think it is the simplest solution. Here is the website I built with it
I hope this helps.
This one is free, I have used it and it works pretty well: http://www.codeplex.com/IIRF
The nice thing is that it will handle url's without an extension (i.e. .aspx, .html, etc.)
You can achieve this with ASP.NET routing.You can do this with ASP.NET MVC as well as Webforms.No need to do anything with IIS.
Check the below link
https://web.archive.org/web/20201205221404/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/articles/051309-1.aspx#postadlink
I did URL routing in my web application within 1 hour with the details from the above link.Its quite simple to learn .They provide sample codes too.It will help you to do it easily
You can retrieve the Id of the content using the title.But title should be unique.You can use ajax to check whether the title is a already existing one when user takes mouse out from the textbox.
Easiest way is to add a http module to your current webforms project.
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx
This shows you the basics of it, But it can easily be expanded so that the pages you want to rewite is taken from a database or even built on the fly.
ASP.net MVC is your friend for that
stackoverflow use MVC
I've noticed a lot of Microsoft sites have the *.MSPX extension. While I'm very familiar with ASP.NET, I've not seen this extension before.
Does anyone know what this identifies?
A few internet searches led me to http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_column_46.mspx, but it was a dead link. Fortunately, it was archived on the Wayback Machine and you can read it here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20040803120105/http://www.microsoft.com/backstage/bkst_column_46.mspx
The .MSPX extension is part of the "Microsoft Network Project," which according to the article above, is designed to give Microsoft's sites a consistent look-and-feel worldwide, as well as keep the design of the site seperate from the content. Here's the gist of the article:
The presentation framework includes a custom Web handler built in ASP.NET. Pages that use the presentation framework have the .mspx filename extension, which is registered in Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) on the Web servers. When one of the Microsoft.com Web servers receives a request for an .mspx page, this custom Web handler intercepts that call and passes it to the framework for processing.
The framework first checks to see whether the result is cached. If it is, the page is rendered immediately. If the page is not cached, the handler looks up the URL for that page in the table of contents provided by the site owner (see below) to determine where the XML content for the page is stored. The framework then checks to see if the XML is cached, and either returns the cached content or retrieves the XML from the data store identified in the table of contents file.
Within the file that holds the content for the page, XML tags identify the content template to be used. The framework retrieves the appropriate template and uses a series of XSLTs to assemble the page, including the masthead, the footer, and the primary navigational column, finally rendering the content within the content pane.
I think it's an XML based template system that outputs HTML. I think it's internal to MS only.
Well, a little googling found this:
The presentation framework includes a
custom Web handler built in ASP.NET.
Pages that use the presentation
framework have the .mspx filename
extension, which is registered in
Microsoft Internet Information
Services (IIS) on the Web servers.
When one of the Microsoft.com Web
servers receives a request for an
.mspx page, this custom Web handler
intercepts that call and passes it to
the framework for processing."
I'd like to find out more info though.
I love you guys, i was asking myself also many times, why MS uses .mspx and what it is at all?! :)
That time i couldn´t find any informations quickly and assumed it would just be something on top of asp.net or maybe not even that, because you should be able to assign the same asp.net cgi dll to .mspx also easy too ;)
But, surely, it can be anything.. also an "special" CGI itself (completely beside ASP.NET), which processes that request with much better / much more cache-use, easier editing and so on..
The end of the story was, that i came accross the view, that maybe it´s not important to know, what .mspx exactly is :)