Kentico redirect based off URL - kentico

Question

We have sales rep profile pages that need to be access by firstname.lastname. So an example URL would be www.mysite.com/mark.handy. This redirect to Find-A-Rep-Detail.aspx?SalesRepWebID=mark.handy.
We're currently are buildingout at a big complicated URL Rewrite that looks at the extension and goes from there. It works, but means we need to managing this either in IIS or the web.config across multiple servers.
I'm looking at a way to do this within kentico. I know the community site has profile pages that seem to take a user's firstname.aspx and redirect to a profile page.
The kentico solution would have to check the URL and if the extension doesn't match a list (aspx, html, js, css, asmx, etc) then redirect.
Here's the kicker. Our user data isn't in kentico. we have a .asps page that has a user control that grabs the name and returns the html.
I'm looking at the wildcard URL docs: https://docs.kentico.com/k9/configuring-kentico/configuring-page-urls/wildcard-urls
Is this possible in Kentico, or should we stick with the iis/web.config options?

Answer 1

As the Kentico wildcard URL docs state:
If you need to allow dots in user names and use wildcard URLs with
user names at the same time, move the wildcard in the Page URL to the
middle of the URL, for example: /Members/{UserName}/Profile
If this is not an option, and the "firstname.lastname" pattern must be the last part of the URL, a possible approach would be to use the RequestEvents.Begin global event to detect the "firstname.lastname" pattern, and redirect to the appropriate page.
Assuming you are using Kentico 10:
[assembly: RegisterModule(typeof(SalesRepRedirector))]
public class SalesRepRedirector : Module
{
private static readonly Regex SalesRepRegex = new Regex(#"^\/([a-zA-Z]+\.[a-zA-Z]+)$");
public SalesRepRedirector() : base("SalesRepRedirector") { }
protected override void OnInit()
{
RequestEvents.Begin.Execute += Begin_Execute;
}
private static void Begin_Execute(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
var relativePath = RequestContext.CurrentRelativePath;
var regexMatch = SalesRepRegex.Match(relativePath);
if (regexMatch.Success)
URLHelper.Redirect("~/Find-A-Rep-Detail.aspx?SalesRepWebID=" + regexMatch.Groups[1].Value);
}
}
(Place the file in the App_Code folder, or in a separate assembly)
Some things to note:
You need to tweak the regex, to ensure that the redirection does not affect request for files and pages (.aspx, .css, .js...)
There is some overhead involved when using this approach, as every request will be checked for the pattern

Answer 2

I think you can accomplish this within Kentico. Note, I'm simply providing a proof of concept here and have not yet tested or created anything yet.
Add an alias to the home page (assuming this is the root of the website) so it accepts the invalid url with the username. So something like /{UsersID}. Then using the javascript webpart, you can check for the {?UsersID?} url parameter and redirect them to /Find-A-Rep page. You can even go one step further and on the Find-A-Rep page, add the same alias /Find-A-Rep/{UsersID} and then you can use a friendlier url like /Find-A-Rep/Mark.Handy and still use that querystring parameter if you need in code.

Answer 3

I did a quick test, it sort works but not 100% they way you want, because you cannot use "." in the wildcard URL.
You can create the template Find-A-Rep-Detail.aspx, within the template, use {? firstname ?} and {? lastname ?} to get the value.
Then in the URLs property, set a path or pattern to /{firstname}-{lastname }. If you use . instead of -, it will be replaced with -
So the wildcard URL /john-smith will be displayed by get Find-A-Rep-Detail.aspx template directly and you can get the first and last name.
One important thing for wildcard URL is the right pattern, if there is no prefix and the pattern is just /{somehting}, then your regular pages like /aboutus would be in trouble.

Answer 4

Hello I know this might be more of a manual approach in listing all the potential URLs, but have you considered using this URL Redirection module from Kentico - http://devnet.kentico.com/articles/url-redirection?
As you can list all your 'from' and 'to' urls all within Kentico