I am trying to create a website that when a user types in a url like this http://www.something.com/option1/option2/option3 it uses rewriting to go to http://www.something.com/webpage.aspx?id=#.

I have a website hiearchy in mysql. I want to be able to take what they have for option1, option2, and option3 to go through the hiearchy and get the id.  

I do not have access to iis. I know it is has iis 7 and Microsoft URL Rewrite is installed. I have read some solutions about going into iis 7 and using the * to handle folder urls. I don't have access to do that.

Is there a to handle what I'm looking for? I have created a httpmodule which works for .aspx extensions. I just need some way of doing this when I don't have extensions.

Thanks

Jeff

Hi Jeff,

You can do this without having to access IIS by doing the following:

1. Create Global.asax in your website

2. In Application_BeginRequest you can add code to detect what URL has been specified and then do a rewrite to the actual URL you require to display that page, e.g.

string targetUrl = ""; // This needs to be the actual URL you're trying to map the friendly URL to, so you'll need some code to pair the two together

HttpContext.Current.RewritePath(targetUrl);

Remember you'll probably only want to do this for .aspx files! Css, images, etc., should probably be allowed to do their "usual" thing without rewriting. 

I found this article by Scott Guthrie to be very helpful with understanding URL rewriting: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx

Yeah, I have looked at the link alot. That works for .aspx, however I need it to work for extensionless urls. Approach 3 has a way to handle extensionless urls by putting a rewrite section within your web.config. The problem I have is that my website hiearchy may have changed by addition and removal of pages.

I wonder if I could have all requests go through a single rewrite url. From there I could determine if it is extensionless and then at that point do a rewrite? 

If you use an HttpModule instead of Global.asax, and register the HttpModule so that it runs in Integrated mode, (preCondition="integratedMode"), then the HttpModule will run with static files as well as with .aspx files -- that should include extensionless URLs, too, provided you catch them early enough in the pipeline before IIS rejects them as 404 Not Found.