ASP.NET GUID as Unique Identifier - URL Rewrite.

Question

can you help? i have a DB, the unique identifiers are GUIDS - we need to implement URL rewriting however the page names look terrible for example:

testpage-2668FF87-0A3A-4cac-B9AB-2367D17A76C3.aspx title of page / unique identifier

my DB's that i setup i use Ints as unique identifiers so i never had this problem:

testpage-1.aspx title of page / unique identifier (int)

what do you suggest ?

Answer 1

Ceate a mapping table with GUIDS to a shorter name or a column in your table with a shorter name. Guids are guaranteed to be unique, but that doesn't mean they make for the best unique identifier.

Answer 2

Your public facing URLs should always be clean and legible. (Use "slugs", as above) This ensures that each of your pages generates consistent content for the user (i.e., it is not session based) and is visible to the search engines in a way that they can understand it.

On the database side, just track the extra "url" column and write your queries to utilize it instead of the GUID for "views", but use the GUID internally for UPDATE queries. :)

Answer 3

What I've seen a lot of is instead of exposing the actual guid, base64 encode it and change some of the characters:

public String ConvertBase64( Guid input ) {
    String sResult = Convert.ToBase64String(input.ToByteArray(), Base64FormattingOptions.None);
    sResult = sResult.Replace("/", "_").Replace("+", "-");
    sResult = sResult.Substring(0, 22);
    return sResult;
} // method::ConvertBase64(guid)

When converting it back you do the opposite.

public String Base64ToGuid( String input) {
    input = input.Replace("_", "/").Replace("-", "+");
    result = new Guid(Convert.FromBase64String(input + "=="));
}