url rewriting

W

wotech

Perch
I have more and more clients wanting to do url rewriting on Windows servers. I know there are lots of 3rd party components out there that allow regular expression URL rewriting with ASP and ASP.NET. 2 of the most well-known ones (OPURL and ISAPI Rewrite) are pretty cheap--$50 for the former, $100 for the latter. I've lost a couple clients over this, because they want this capability for their SEO, to make their dynamic pages "spiderable" and show up when searching for keywords.

I know one has to use caution when installing 3rd party components, but these components have been around for a long long time and are used by a lot of people.

I know there are lots of asp "hacks" for making a URL rewriting like system, but they don't offer support for regular expressions and are just kind of halfa**.

Will Jodohost accomodate these needs?
 
I know this doesn't help if your client has fixed requirements but, for what its worth, you can do rewriting in .NET without special help from the host. An HttpModule is just a piece of .NET code that can be installed and configured like any other. This is how DotNetNuke does it (and another reason why asp.net is so cool :) ).

The only real limitation is that the request still needs to be a .NET (ie .aspx) request for it to get into the pipeline in the first place. You can't rewrite a .html request but you can certainly change a long query string to something more friendly without the question mark. You can rewrite a default request (ie no file) if you make a directory containing Default.aspx. Okay, that last bit might be a hack but it works if you don't have lots of them.

Here's an interesting article I only skimmed it quickly but he seems to have forgotten the aspx only limitation. I've heard of some people setting IIS to pass everything through .NET which is obviously not an option on a shared host.

Cheers
Ross
 
Another technique is to use Custom 404 Error page with Server.Transfer in ASP.
Works pretty well!
 
Thanks for the ideas, but I've tried both already, and neither do true RegEx URL rewriting. Most of my requests are for ASP url rewriting. The 404 method is very limited....mainly because querystrings can't be used in server.transfer, which is what most people need to do (when pulling info from a database). Sessions kinda work, but get messy, and it's a "hack".

Is JodoHost going to do anything??? I haven't heard from anyone...why doesn't someone from Jodohost respond???
 
Hey wotech,

Don't know if you found your solution and I can't reply on what Jodohost is going to do but I have a solution that is working well for me. Have you checked out www.urlrewriting.net? This is a free assembly that allows for fully customizable urlrewriting. I'm using it for the reasons you described above (seo).

While I haven't put the site live on Jodohost yet it should work without issue as you don't need to make any changes to IIS. Just add a reference to the assembly and make a few changes to your web.config file and your off and running. The only caveat is that the spider friendly url needs to point to an aspx file so the .Net engine can grab it and rewrite it. The file doesn't have to exist though. For instance I have a single search page that handles multiple categories. However, to the external work the urls would be www.mysite.com/var1/var2/category1.aspx, www.mysite.com/var1/var2/category2.aspx etc. Using the rewrite engine I set rules to load the single search page and just extract the category from the page name for use as a query string. Just need to know regular expressions to get the rules in proper syntax.

It's a nice and easy solution. Hope that helps
 
aliweb said:
Another technique is to use Custom 404 Error page with Server.Transfer in ASP.
Click to expand...
Hi there,

aliweb, I'm working on that way of "faking" mod_rewrite in ASP (posted about it). Does server.transfer work for you at jodohost? I want to keep URL from the "caller" page but always get the "called" one's.

LikeButta, you can't run 3rd party components on some Jodo hosting plans :(
 
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