URL rewriting in asp.net for content management system - asp.net

URL rewriting in asp.net for content management system

Url Rewriting with ASP.NET by Scott Guthrie
URL Rewriting in ASP.NET by Scott Mitchell

I've done old-school URL Rewriting in ASP.NET and it works, but I'd really recommend that you look into using Routing instead. It works with ASP.NET Webforms as well as MVC, and it's more smoothly baked into the ASP.NET system.
One other option you can look into is the IIS URL Rewriting module. It's worked well for me.

Related

How to create a blog in ASP.NET and not ASP.NET MVC

I have created a blog application with ASP.NET MVC and MSSQL. I must say, i really enjoyed the process of creating an application with ASP.NET MVC. Clean URLS(with URL routing), No view States and so on.
BUT i was wondering how would this would have been done if i choose web-form style coding? will the aspx would be created in the fly as i create a article.(take this url for ex: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/10/06/announcing-nupack-asp-net-mvc-3-beta-and-webmatrix-beta-2.aspx) though the URL is not clean but still makes sense. if yes then what about its corresponding cs file? if no how is the URL so clean?
Would be great if someone throw some light on how it is done in ASP.NET.
Thank you, Faraaz.
If your using .NET 4, you can make use of MapPageRoute to accomplish the clean URL's with regular Web Forms.
routes.MapPageRoute("MySuperCleanRoute", "some/clean/url", "~/ActualPage.aspx");
With the addition of MapPageRoute, you no longer have the feeling "I should use ASP.NET MVC because i want clean URL's".
Choose ASP.NET MVC if you like the pattern. If your used to Web Forms, use it - and use MapPageRoute to achieve clean URL's (or use a URL Rewriting module if <= .NET 4)
A blog in ASP .NET would have been done in much the same way. The idea is to use one file and URL rewriting. IIS7 has URL rewriting built in but for IIS6 you can use something like ISAPI_Rewrite to handle .htaccess style files (which is what Apache uses).
ASP .NET MVC handles all this for you in its routing but you can do it yourself using a URL rewriting tool. The difference is that for MVC, the application handles the rewriting but ISAPI_Rewrite, IIS Rewriting are done by the server. This can change a URL like http://mysite.com/something/other to http://mysite.com/file.asp?p1=something&p2=other.
The second link is only internal to the server (it doesn't actually change the URL in the user's address bar). In the case of a URL like on Scott's blog, you could store the 'announcing-nupack-asp...' bit in a database as part of the article row so your blog article page has something to look for. The files don't actually exist on the server but the rewriting passes all requests to an existing file with parameters.
Note that this technique is common for lots of different sites - not just blogs. Notice the Stack Overflow URL, Twitter URLs, etc.
MSDN has an old article on URL Rewriting in ASP .NET, along with some examples of filters you can use.
See IIS URL Rewrite Module
You can use the URL Rewriting that is in asp.net MVC with WebForms if you are using .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 (if you don't have access to .Net 4)
Here's an MSDN magazine article explaning...

Having URL without .aspx extension

I noticed a lot of ASP .Net sites does not have the URL ending with ".aspx".
An example would be:
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions
Did they create a Questions folder and put a Default.aspx inside?
In that case, wouldn't there be A LOT of default.aspx in many folders which is hard to maintain (even though it is user-friendly)?
Thanks y'all.
StackOverflow is written using ASP.NET MVC. The MVC framework does not use .aspx files.
The way it works internally is by using routing tables - see an overview here.
You can also do this with ASP.NET and .aspx files or you can use URL rewriting. You can read about the differences here.
You can refer to any URL rewriter or a routing technique for that. If you look at the new AS{.NET MVC, it works on that model only.
You can use Url Rewriter to remove extensions from the urls of your website.
ASP.net has a routing framework you can use even if you are not using ASP.net MVC
Official documentation: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668201.aspx
Also as previously stated ASP.net MVC works like this out of the box and you can also use URL Rewriting
With ASP.NET 4.0, you get the benefits of URL routing (nice, clean URLs) with ASP.NET webforms, too — see:
Routing for Web Forms in ASP.NET 4.0
URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms (VS 2010 and .NET 4.0 Series)
Basically, what you do is define a route like
/question/{id} or /question/{title}
and you then define what ASPX page this is being routed to. Quite nifty!

ASP.NET web pages without aspx file extension

What is best solution to serve ASP.NET web pages without aspx extension? I want to make http://www.mydomain.com/mypage instead of http://www.mydomain.com/mypage.aspx
I use .NET 2.0 and IIS6
If you can upgrade to .Net 4.0,which got a built-in URL Routing feature to do it for you easily,read this article by Scott Mitchel
otherwise if you don't want to move to .net 4.0,read this article by Scott Gu
Url rewriting.
For .NET there are already modules available like this one.
For IIS 6.0 you can use ionics ISAPI URL Rewrite filter http://iirf.codeplex.com/ for extention less urls

ASP.NET :URL masking

I have an ASP.NET web application where i have a page Signup.aspx and a home page.aspx.In my home page i have link to the signup.aspx page.I want to Hide the file extension.aspx from the addressbar when someone clicks on the signup link in home page.I want to show it as http://mysite.com/signup . Is there anyway to do this ? I am using VS 2008
thanks in advance
If you are using ASP.NET 3.5 ASP.NET Routing could be a good choice for you.
MSDN page: msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc668201.aspx
Using it with ASP.NET MVC at ScottGu blog: weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/03/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-2-url-routing.aspx
Using it with ASP.NET 3.5: www.techbubbles.com/aspnet/aspnet-35-url-routing/
If your website runs under ASP.NET 2.0 Helicon ISAPI Rewrite could be a good choise for you. This is an IIS filter that redirects requests to your pages according to regex-based configuration file. They have a free version for one website.
Have a look at Helicon: www.isapirewrite.com
The simplest way would just be having a folder named "signup" with a default page that redirects to signup.aspx
Another option which does not involve rewriting the URL yourself is using the ASP.NET MVC Framework which will handle that kind of stuff pretty easily.

URLs like ASP.NET MVC offers

Is there any way to implement a URL mechanisim in asp.net like it has in asp.net mvc
e.g. mydomain.com/user/myusername but without using the MVC
if so, how?
You do this by using the System.Web.Routing assembly
Here's a blogpost showing how :-)
You can use the same routing mechanism that ASP.NET MVC uses inside of an ASP.NET WebForm application. Check this post by Phil Haack on how to learn more about it.
or
If you don't want to use the routing feature and you want to roll your own, check this question out.
If you have access to IIS:
If it is IIS7, the URL Rewriting module might work.
Set IIS up to process ANY request with ASP.NET, and add an entry to Global.ashx
If it is Apache, use mod_rewrite.
Otherwise, you could use:
http://myserver/Web.aspx/url/1
or:
http://myserver/Url.aspx/1
and process Request.Uri.PathInfo
It has to go to a .aspx file somewhere, as otherwise it will not be processed.
I've done this in the past with ASP.NET 2.0 and the UrlRewrite.Net library
The only trick is that if you want it to work with paths that don't have aspx extensions, you have to configure IIS to pass every request through the ASP.NET engine.
I built a classic ASP.NET (I can't believe this term exists) application around 2005 that used rewriting, and this article on MSDN was very helpful at the time: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx.
If you're constrained to 2.0, or even 1.1, this may be the way to go, as System.Web.Routing is 3.5 only.
IIRF does URL Rewrite for IIS5 and 6.
It supports Regex. Free. Open source.

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