How to efficiently create facebook-like url-rewriting in asp.net

Question

Hello all,

I'm currently looking into url-rewriting and how it should be done right and hope you have some inputs here.

At the current stage of development only the kind of url-rewriting I'm interested in is adding facebook like behavior to businesses to which we provide services on our site, i.e. www.mysite.com/ShowBusinessInfo.aspx?id=1 should be rewritten to www.mysite.com/HostedBusinessName. - The idea is that when a business registers on our site they can choose whatever the last part of the url should be.

What would be the best way to support this feature? Custom IHttpModule, Global.asax (I'm afraid that this is too slow?), UrlRewriter.net/UrlRewriting.net or a completely different solution.

The site is developed in asp.net and runs on IIS 7.5.

-Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I've actually done something like this before and this is the article I used as a resource: http://stweet.wordpress.com/2010/03/15/creating-a-new-website-programmatically-on-iis-using-asp-net/

This article will tell you how to programmically add a web site to your IIS using C#. Keep in mind that depending on how your IIS and DNS is setup, you may need to also modify your DNS server. You can find various scripts for doing this here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms682129%28VS.85%29.aspx

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

If you have fairly simply rewriting rules, I'd use an IHttpModule that attempts to match the URL's LocalPath property with a value in your DB, and then calls context.RewritePath(string).

If you have more complex stuff, then I'd start looking at UrlRewriting.NET or the routing options in ASP.NET.