Can I have 'friendly' url's without a URL rewriter in IIS? - iis

Without having a url rewriter such as ISAPI_Rewrite available, is it possible to achieve the following:
I would like a user to browse to http://www.jjj.com/directory where /directory does not actually exist. IIS transfers the user to not-found.cfm.
At this point I can serve index.cfm i.e. http://www.jjj.com/directory/index.cfm.
The url will display just fine and the page loads even though the directory or index.cfm doesn't exist. However I'd like to be able to not have index.cfm in the url.
Ideal:
Page Request to http://www.jjj.com/directory
IIS loads not-found.cfm as the default 404 errorhandler.
Not found strips the CGI.query_string and uses cfswitches to funnel the user to the appropriate controller function. May use onMissingTemplate?
The page request never changes in the URL and the page loads transparently the user with 200 OK status
If a user requests http://www.jjj.com/directory/index.cfm I would 301 redirect to http://www.jjj.com/directory
Current:
Page Request to http://www.jjj.com/directory
IIS loads not-found.cfm as default 404 error handler.
Not found strips the CGI.query_string and uses cfswitches to funnel the user to the appropriate controller function.
The page request changes to http://www.jjj.com/directory/index.cfm with a 200 OK status

You're asking how to cut something but telling us you're not allowed to use a knife or anything resembling one.
Here's my only clever idea using onMissingTemplate().
GET /directory/
-> 404.cfm
-> <cfinclude template="#cgi.script_name#/special.cfm" />
-> fires onMissingTemplate() where you ignore the "special.cfm" bit and just use the rest of the requested path to figure out what controller to wire up to.
This is a kludgy hack, though, so I would try to avoid it myself. Maybe if you explain why ISAPI Rewriting isn't an option, then we might be able to help further.

You can tell IIS to have 404 and 403 errors execute a custom URL on your site (such as /urlhandler.cfm).
Then, you can parse the 'cgi.query_string' and route the application anyway you desire using cfinclude to simply include the correct 'template.cfm', or, you can reformat the input your framework is expecting, or, use a project like http://coldcourse.riaforge.org/.
Just one note, IIS will give you a URL that looks like this: '404;http://yoursite.com/the/url/you/wanted/to/route'.

Is IIS7 on the approved list of software? That can get you native url rewriting and side-step the whole issue.
Second option -- my CFM voodoo is rusty, but I think you can setup IIS6 to look for a CFM page (like you are doing) but then step in at the application level and do the url rewriting/repointing before it actually hits the 404 page.
Another way around it -- find an ISAPI url rewriter that is, say, under the MIT license. Build your own copy. Then have them install that as part of your software package.

Related

.htaccess redirection keeping my orginal URL

I would like to have the following setup using .htaccess.
domain.com/test/hello.php or domain.com/index.php or any other link must show only domain.com in the URL.
Kindly share your views on this.
As implied by Jon Lin, this is not directly possible as the server cannot guess what content should be loaded. The simple rule of HTTP is that each request has its own response.
Furthermore, it should be noted that, if it were possible (by some kind of magic - perhaps by the use of AJAX), it wouldn't be good for SEO, as Google/Bing/whatever wouldn't be able to index your site.
If you really wanted to mimic the behaviour, you could run the following HTML5 History API method in JavaScript:
window.history.pushState("", document.title, "/");
This will change the address bar to show only your domain name, and will more than likely have side-effects.

view the real htaccessed link

how can i view the real URL without the functionality of .htaccess rewrite file ?
while using url rewrite with the .htaccess file you able to see sites like this :
example.com/i/154/b/6574534
i want to see the "source" of the url , such as
example.com/index.php?i=15&b=6574534
It sounds like you want to reverse the URL rewriting, without having server-level access to the server you are interested in. If this is the case, what you're asking for is not possible unless the server provides an API, a custom HTTP header in the response, another link on the page, or some other method to find the non-rewritten URL. The ability to do otherwise would defeat many purposes of URL rewriting.

How to move pages around and rename them while not breaking incoming links from external sites that still use the poorly formed URLs

update
Here is the situation:
I'm working on a website that has no physical folder structure. Nothing had been planned or controlled and there were about 4 consecutive webmasters.
Here is an example of an especially ugly directory
\new\new\pasite-new.asp
most pages are stored in a folder with the same name as the file, for maximum redundancy.
\New\10cap\pasite-10cap.asp
\QL\Address\PAsite-Address.asp
each of these [page directories]? (I don't know what else to call them) has an include folder, the include folder contains the same *.inc files in every case, just copied about 162 times for each page directory. The include folder was duplicated so that the
<!--#include file="urlstring"--> would work correctly due to lack of understanding of relative paths, and the #inclue virtual directive or using server.execute()
Here is a picture if my explanation was lacking.
Here are some of my limitations:
The site is written in ASP classic
Server is Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 , IIS 6 (According to my resource)
I have no access to the IIS server
I would have to go through a process to add any modules or features to iis
What changes can I make that would allow me to move pages around and rename them while not breaking incoming links from external sites that still use the poorly formed URLs?
To make my question more specific.
How can I move the file 10cap.asp from \new\10cap\ to a better location like \ and rename the file to someting like saveourhomescap.asp and not break any incoming links and finally, not have to leave a dummy 10cap.asp page in the original location with a redirect to the new page.
Wow, that's a lot of limitations to deal with.
Can you setup a custom error page? If so you can add some code into a custom error page that would redirect users to the new page. So maybe you create a custom 404 page, and in that page you grab the query string variable and based on that send the user to the correct "new" page. That would allow you to delete all of the old pages.
Here is a pretty good article on this method: URL Rewriting for Classic ASP
Well, you have a lot of limitations and especially no access to the IIS server hurts. An ISAPI module for URL rewriting is not an option here (IIS) and equally a custom 404 page where you could read the referer and forward with a HTTP 301 won't work (IIS).
I would actually recommend you to go through the process and let them install:
An ISAPI URL rewriting module
or if that doesn't work (for any reason):
Let them point the HTTP 404 of your web to a custom 404.asp, read the referer and redirect with a HTTP 301 (Moved Permanently) to your new location.
If none of this is an option for you, I can think about another possibility. I haven't actually tried that so I'm not 100% sure if it will work, but in theory it sounds good ;)
You could make in your global.asa in the Session_OnStart event a Response.Redirect or change the header of your response to a HTTP 301. This will actually only work for new users and not fix real 404 errors. Sorry, for the pseudo code, but it's a while ago that I had anything to do with classic ASP and I think you'll get what I mean ;)
sub Session_OnStart
' here should be a Select Case switch or something like that
Response.Redirect("newlocation.asp")
' or if that will work, this would be better (again with switch)
Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently"
Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://company.com/newlocation.asp"
end sub
Hope that helps.
I recommend using URL Rewrite for that, see the following blog about it, in particular "Site Reorganization":
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/carlosag/archive/2008/09/02/iis7urlrewriteseo.aspx
For more info about URL Rewrite see: http://www.iis.net/download/URLRewrite
You can try ISAPIRewrite since it's classic ASP + IIS6
http://www.isapirewrite.com/
They have a lite version which is free, probably good enough for your use.
urlrewrite will only work if you can install a dll on the server
one of these articles will help
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=qRR&q=url+rewrite+classic+asp&btnG=Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g-m1
basically you have to point 404 errors to an error page which will parse the incoming querystring / post info and redirect user to correct location with incoming parameters added.
variations on that theme will be found in the examples fro google.

Dynamically creating URLs for other websites

I'd like to know how websites have created URLs with other domains like these on trafficestimate.com.
I'm guessing it's some .htaccess stuff to redirect domain names to a dynamic page?
Thanks
Your URL has an GET Request. So when someone calls the page http://google.com/search with the parameters hl=en, safe=off etc., the page can process those parameters. So for instance safe=off means that you want to get back any search result. The q=site:... is your search string. In this case Google will look it up in its database and give you the results. So when you call this URL there is probably no .htaccess processing done. However you can process the URL and GET request with .htacces and i.e. redirect the user to another page.
Maybe you'll describe a bit further what exactly you trying to do/want to know. This makes explaining easier.
EDIT: After reading Gumbo's comment I looked at the Google result page. So maybe your question means the trafficestimate-URLs. They look like http://trafficestimate.com/example.org. This is really a good case for .htaccess. So using .htaccess they take the URL and redirect it to http://www.trafficestimate.com/websites/?domain=example.org. Here you have again a GET request and an application builds the page.
Some URL rewriting is probably involved. Otherwise they would have to create an existing file for every possible request.
Using Apache’s mod_rewrite in a .htaccess file is one option. But since the server identifies itself with “Microsoft-IIS/7.5”, they are probably rather using ISAPI_Rewrite, a mod_rewrite derivative for Microsoft’s IIS.

Redirect all HTTP-Requests with *.asp to one single file

Is it possible on an IIS to redirect all files with the file extension .asp to one single file (i.e. switch.php, switch.cfm) and how?
Thx in advance for the upcoming solutions :)
EDIT:
version of IIS is "IIS 6.0"
Here’s a few different thoughts off the top of my head:
Use an ISAPI filter. Either write your own or use a commercial one like Helicon ISAPI Rewrite (the reverse proxy feature should be able to do this).
Add a global.asa file to the root of the site and Response.Redirect to the page you want in the Session_OnStart event (I think this event still fires if the requested page doesn’t actually exist but am not 100% sure). More info here.
Define a new 404 “File not found” page in IIS which loads a custom page with a redirect to your desired URL. You could do this with either client or server side script and make it conditional on the requested URL having a .asp extension so as not to catch genuine 404s for other file types.
I’d say option 1 is your “best practice” approach but option 3 would get you up and running very quickly. Good luck!
your going to want to look into "iis modrewrite" on google :)
lets you use regular expressions to define rules and you can set a global match to rewrite to 1 page

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