Posted: 13 May 2008 at 6:09am | IP Logged

Hi All,

First of all, it's my first time here and I'm a complete ISAPI / URL rewriting newbie so apologies in advance if this may have already been answered somewhere  (and I'm trying to get up to speed with all of the documentation) but I wondered if someone might be able to help me with the following?

I need to set up ISAPI rewrite on my site and primarily want to be able to create URL's such as:

www.mysite.com/usa (which would actually be www.mysite.com/folder/file.asp?variable=1)

www.mysite.com/florida (which would actually be www.mysite.com/folder/file.asp?variable=1&variable=2 )

www.mysite.com/orlando (which would actually be www.mysite.com/folder/file.asp?variable=1&variable=2&variable=3 )

and finally....

www.mysite.com/davenport (which would actually be www.mysite.com/folder/file.asp?variable=1&variable=2&variable=3&variable=4 )

I've seen from the documentation how I could do this if I included the variable in the URL (i.e. davenport-1-2-3-4), but ideally I'd like to just have the words in the URL. Is this possible?

Also, I need to accommodate paging I guess? So something like:

www.mysite.com/folder/file.asp?variable=1&variable=2&variable=3&variable=4&page=1

would become:

www.mysite.com/davenport/p1

Feel a bit out of my league on this at the mo so any help / tips would be really welcome!

Thanks
Kessa

Posted: 13 May 2008 at 6:18am | IP Logged

Whoops - sorry, forgot to mention that some of the resulting new URL's will probably have spaces in them (i.e. "Costa Blanca") so need to also replace any spaces with hypens (i.e. "costa-blanca").

Also, (just thinking agead) I don't think any of the locations already include hyphens, but is there a way to only include a hypen if one doesn't exist? I'm just trying to avoid getting something like "costa--blanca"

Thanks

Posted: 17 May 2008 at 7:03pm | IP Logged

bugger -pls tell me u r kidding

I've got thousands of urls to rewrite and apparently the host only has v2 installed - they tried v3 but apparently had loads of problems with it

Posted: 20 May 2008 at 12:10pm | IP Logged

Actually, in the mean time, would you be able to give me some pointers about how I could do the individual rules in version2 - at least from the front end point of view I would be able to start introducing these for the search engines to begin crawling.

Thanks

Posted: 23 May 2008 at 5:23am | IP Logged

Hi Guys,

Just following up on this - I found this in the documentation:

"Another and more complex solution is to create 1 to 1 map file and use it to map “our_super_tool” to 127. This solution is useful for some long URLs with many parameters and will allow you to hide even numeric identifier. The URL will look as http://www.mysite.com/products/our_super_tool.asp. Please note that “our_super_tool” part should uniquely identify the product and it’s identifier. Here is an example for this solution:

RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteMap mapfile txt:mapfile.txt RewriteRule ^products/([^?/]+)\.asp /productpage.asp?productID=${mapfile:$1}

And you will need to create mapfile.txt map file with the following content:

one_product       1 another_product   2 our_super_tool    127 more_products     335

"

.....which is a great start, but I'm not sure how I would go about converting URL's with more than 1 variable?

Any advice / help would be much appreciated.

Thanks
Kessa

Posted: 28 May 2008 at 4:20am | IP Logged

Brilliant - thanks both.

Xoise - when you say the URL would look slightly different, could you show an example please? Also, using your method how would I go about handling the various variable levels? For example, would I need to do the following?

RewriteRule /([a-z]*)-([0-9]*)$ /folder/file.asp?variable=$1[I,NC,L]
RewriteRule /([a-z]*)-([0-9]*)$ /folder/file.asp?variable=$2 [I,NC,L]
RewriteRule /([a-z]*)-([0-9]*)$ /folder/file.asp?variable=$3 [I,NC,L]

Sorry, I'm new to all this so still trying to get my head around it.

Thanks

Posted: 04 June 2008 at 7:30am | IP Logged

Hi Guys,

OK, I've decided to go with the 1-2-1 delaration for the time being as the host has said they won't move to version 3 yet.

With that in mind, here's an example of my code so far:

[ISAPI_Rewrite]
# do not delete the line above

RewriteEngine on
# Commented

# Block access to the httpd.ini
RewriteRule /httpd(?:\.ini|\.parse\.errors) / [F,I,O]

# Block access to Helper ISAPI
RewriteRule .*\.isrwhlp / [F,I,O]

#Fix missing trailing slash char on folders
RewriteRule ^([^.?]+[^.?/])$ $1/ [R,L]

#Rules
RewriteRule ^/spain/$ /folder/file.asp?variable=5

My next question is, how do I get it to check to make sure the user hasn't tried to add an extention such as .asp / .html, etc?

I did try using this bit of code from the documentation but it didn't work so I suspect I may be implementing it wrongly:

#Redirect extension requests to avoid duplicate content
RewriteRule ^([^?]+)\.asp$ $1 [NC,R=301,L]

#Internally add extensions to request
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.asp -f
RewriteRule (.*) $1.asp

(I added this above the "fix missing training slash" command thinking it would strip off the extention... then the fix trailing slash adds the slash, and then the last rule does the final redirect)

Thanks

Posted: 04 June 2008 at 6:04pm | IP Logged

Hi Lexy,

Thanks. I've added that but it redirects to:

/folder/file/ rather than /spain/

Am I missing something?

Thanks