Rewriting URLs in ASP.NET?

Question

I am using ASP.NET C#.

How do I implement URL re-writing procedure that is similar to StackOverflow.com?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/358630/how-to-search-date-in-sql

Also, what is the meaning of values such as "358630" in the URL? Is this the question ID (the basis for which they use to fetch the data from the table)? Whatever it is, in my application I am identifying records using an "ID" field. This field is an identity column in an SQL table. Right now, my URLs are like the following:

http://myweb.com/showdetails.aspx?id=9872

But I'd like them to appear like:

http://myweb.com/showdetails/9872/my_question_title

Or:

http://myweb.com/9872/my_question_title

Or whatever the best way, which will taste good to search bots.

My application is hosted on Go Daddy's shared hosting service, and I feel that no customized ASP.NET "HTTP module" or no customized DLL for URL re-writing is working on their server. I tried many samples but no luck yet!

I found that Stack Overflow is hosted on Go Daddy (shared hosting?). Maybe Stack Overflow's method will work for me.

Answer 1

SO is using ASP.NET MVC. You really need to read in details how MVC URL rewriting works, but the gist of it is that the 'questions' part in the URL is the name of the Controller class (which roughly corresponds to the 'showdetails' in your URL) and the number is a ID parameter for the default action on that Controller (same as the parameter 'id' in your URL).

Answer 2

Before the advent of System.Web.Routing, the common practice was to use UrlRewriter.NET. Worked well enough, but could bite you when configuring IIS. I'm not sure if there are any simple ways of using the new Routing classes in ASP.NET (i.e., drop it in and go vs. refactoring code).

Answer 3

Since MVC isn't an option you can try redirecting the 404s. This will work in ASP.NET 1.1 and above: Redirect 404s and 405s to your own handler using either IIS config or web.config, parse out the request in the handler and redirect to the appropriate resource.

<configuration>
   <system.web>
    <customErrors mode="On" defaultRedirect="error.html">
     <error statusCode="404" redirect="newHandler.aspx"/>
    </customErrors>       
   </system.web>
</configuration>

Answer 4

please explain the meaning of values such as "358630" in the URL

That is (presumably) the ID for the question in the database. In the MVC model

 myurl.com/questions/358630

is analogous to

myurl.com/questions.aspx?id=358630

The question title on the end of the URL is actually being ignored by the app. It's generally "tacked on" for search engine optimization and human readability purposes. In fact, you can change the title of this question in the URL and notice the page still loads just fine.

Answer 5

The new System.Web.Routing dll is part of ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, and is bin deployable on ASP.NET 3.5, so you could use the features of that on a classic ASP.NET WebForms site.

You'll probably want to take note of Phil Haack's comments in his post on using MVC on IIS 6 as you'll probably need to include the .aspx extension in your routed urls

http://www.mysite.com/controler.aspx/action/id

You might also want to check out Questions Tagged SEO.

The ignored question name at the end of the url is often called a "Slug", and is used for SEO purposes to include the page title in the url.