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Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

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    Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

    Greetings. This is my first post to the Alpha forum. :)

    I'm strongly considering using Alpha Five for internal application development.

    I'm also considering how well it might work as a main public website. Part of the requirements would be the ability to handle URL rewriting. "Pretty URLs" are aesthetically pleasing and are touted as having SEO benefits.

    So, a question for the development team: Will the upcoming Alpha Five IIS integration module support the URL rewrite module under IIS 7 / 7.5?

    Many thanks!

    #2
    Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

    Hello, all.

    I posted this question about a week ago.

    Recognizing that the development team doesn't actively monitor each question in the forum, is there a way to elicit a response from development on this question? Some observation about how this an other IIS7-related features will integrate with A5 would be most appreciated.

    Thanks!

    Comment


      #3
      Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

      Hi Mark,

      As this forum is mainly to help with development of applications with the existing releases of Alpha, I suggest you ask your question to [email protected] I'm sure they would pass this to the correct department.
      Regards
      Keith Hubert
      Alpha Guild Member
      London.
      KHDB Management Systems
      Skype = keith.hubert


      For your day-to-day Needs, you Need an Alpha Database!

      Comment


        #4
        Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

        Thanks for the advice, Keith. I'll give sales a try.

        Cheers,

        Mark

        Comment


          #5
          Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

          A (belated) update:

          Richard Rabins asked Kurt Rayner to comment on my question. His reply:

          Alpha Five will integrate into the IIS request pipeline as a managed handler. Since the URL Rewrite Module is invoked at the �Begin Request� phase of the pipeline, I don�t anticipate any problems.

          Comment


            #6
            Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

            After looking at the rewrite descriptions, Although I don't know the exact procedure I feel confident that you could create your own 'rewrite module' within Alpha5 now.
            Win 10 64 Development, Win 7 64 WAS 11-1, 2, Win 10 64 AA-1,2, MySql, dbForge Studio The Best MySQL GUI Tool IMHO. http://www.devart.com/dbforge/mysql/studio/

            Comment


              #7
              Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

              Originally posted by frankbicknell View Post
              After looking at the rewrite descriptions, Although I don't know the exact procedure I feel confident that you could create your own 'rewrite module' within Alpha5 now.
              If your URL is http:/localhost/test then Was will search a subfolder named test and there a default page for example index.a5w. If it does not found it Was will throw an error back. So how you bypass this behavior within Alpha5 now? I don't feel confident at all this is possible now.

              If you cheat Was with index.a5w in folder test with redirect then the redirect url has to be a valid url with extension. I don't see anyway to bypass this behavior with Was.

              My conclusion is that url that client sees will always have page extension(and query parameters) with Alpha.

              Comment


                #8
                Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

                Originally posted by frankbicknell View Post
                After looking at the rewrite descriptions, Although I don't know the exact procedure I feel confident that you could create your own 'rewrite module' within Alpha5 now.
                Yes, and no.

                Originally posted by kkfin View Post
                So how you bypass this behavior within Alpha5 now? I don't feel confident at all this is possible now.
                Theoretically, you would do the following:
                • Create a processing A5W page. It's job would be to parse out the (bogus/non-existent) requested path and return whatever dynamic content you like.
                • Assign the 404 "not found" error page (under Web Project Control Panel > View > Application Server > Errors Tab) to the published location of the A5W page created above.

                The interaction process would go like this:
                • User browses to your 'pretty URL' (e.g., mydomain.com/your-non-existent-sub-directory-1/your-non-existent-sub-directory-2/)
                • The web application server ("WAS") processes the request and finds that it can't locate the requested file/directory.
                • WAS calls up the 404 error page that you created.
                • The 404 error page parses out the components of the URL and displays your desired dynamic content.

                Caveat: It appears that, once WAS calls up the 404 error, one can't change the header response code and description via X-Basic from "404 - Not Found" to "200 - OK". This is an issue because sending a 404 response code to search engines would be the kiss of death to your public web pages. They would eventually just drop out of search indexes.

                So, unless Alpha is willing to modify this behavior in the near future, we may need to wait for Alpha to complete their transition from Alpha's WAS to Microsoft's IIS before getting URL rewriting. As I noted in my earlier posts, Microsoft's IIS is currently capable of gracefully handling URL rewriting. Fingers crossed.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

                  Originally posted by waldhorn View Post
                  Theoretically, you would do the following:
                  • Create a processing A5W page. It's job would be to parse out the (bogus/non-existent) requested path and return whatever dynamic content you like.
                  • Assign the 404 "not found" error page (under Web Project Control Panel > View > Application Server > Errors Tab) to the published location of the A5W page created above.
                  As I explained if you don't give Was page extension it understand request as a folder name and you can't change this behavior. You can process this request easily but Was always seeks the default pages listed in server configuration and the response url you give will have to have full page name and needed query strings so no nice urls at all. So this is not possible even in theory.

                  Normally with nice urls the nice url points in fact to a function and the function process the request to the "right url". This is not possible in Alpha.

                  If you run Was behind reverse proxy then you can have nice urls of course.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

                    Originally posted by kkfin View Post
                    As I explained if you don't give Was page extension it understand request as a folder name and you can't change this behavior.
                    Hi Ken. Thank you for your ongoing discussion. In my experimentation, it appears that WAS understands and records the full request, including missing folders and sub-folders, and assigns it to the property Request.Script_Name. (See wiki entry on Request Object.)

                    So, going back to the method that I outlined above, let's say that we've set up 404-processing.a5w in the application server's configuration to process 404 errors. And, in that file we write
                    Code:
                    <p>Request.Script_Name: <%a5 ? Request.Script_Name %></p>
                    Now, if we browse to mydomain.com/non-existent-sub-folder-1/non-existent-sub-folder-2/ , WAS--unable to locate these phantom folders--hands off the request to 404-processing.a5w which then processes our request and, voil�, successfully returns the following to our browser:
                    Request.Script_Name: /non-existent-sub-folder-1/non-existent-sub-folder-2/

                    Meanwhile, the browser continues to display our 'friendly' URL. All that is left is to code a method for parsing the results of Request.Script_Name for further dynamic processing by our application.

                    I've tried it out, and it does appear to work as expected. However, I still haven't figured out how to override the undesired header response of "404 - Not Found" and change it to the search-engine-friendly "200 - OK". I tried Response.StatusCode = 200 and Response.StatusDescription = "OK" (see discussion here), but they are ignored by WAS when processing a 404 error. Perhaps there's a way...or we may just need to wait for a more elegant solution in the upcoming release of Alpha's IIS module.

                    Best,

                    Mark

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

                      In fact seems like you are right. I tested earlier using response.redirect with full path and that makes the fully page name also in URL.
                      Let say you have url http://localhost/test. You can cheat Alpha creating test folder under root and then put index.a5w in that folder. All the code and html is then in this file. Then you get normal 200 ok response and the url seems to remain nice. This seems to also work with links and also with response.redirect("http://localhost/test").

                      I just tested in localhost.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Re: Support for URL rewriting under IIS7

                        From a related thread today, Alpha will soon allow overriding the response code in custom error pages.

                        Originally posted by Lenny Forziati View Post
                        You will be able to do this by setting Response.StatusCode and Response.StatusDescription as of the next prerelease. The server was inadvertently overwriting any value you may set in a custom error page and that has now been fixed.
                        With that, one should now be able to use the custom 404 error page to deploy a basic URL rewrite engine, server-wide, and still display the desired response code. While this may not be as elegant a solution as employing a dedicated rewrite module (as found Apache, IIS, etc.), it should serve in the interim until Alpha's transition to IIS.

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