How to rewrite urls without having access to IIS MMC

[Max2006]

Hi,

I am using a asp.net hosting service and I don't have access to IIS MMC.

I would like to implement a URL rewriting service so all urls with shape:

http://domainname.com/nnnn.jpeg

get redirected to:

http://domainname.com/images/ImageHandler.aspx?n=nnnn

Can I do that just by using web.config?

Any link to url re-writing article would be a great help.

Regards,
Max

[philwilks]

Hi Max,

Unless I'm mistaken, I don't think it's going to be possible to do this
exactly as you want. The main problem is that files with extensions
like .jpeg or .gif are not handled by the ASP.Net engine. In other
words, the ASP.Net part of the server won't have any idea that a
request for one of these pages has been made.

If you had your own server, you could change this behavior and have
requests for .jpeg files handled by ASP.Net. However, I seriously doubt
that your hosting provider would be willing to set this up.

The next best option is to use a "custom HTTP handler", which is a
special ASP.Net page with the extension .ashx. In fact, your
ImageHandler.aspx page should really be a .ashx page, but you'll
probably get away with doing it either way.

I highly recommend using www.urlrewriting.net to do the re-writing.
ASP.Net 2.0 does allow you to do some basic re-writing, but it doesn't
let you use regular expressions or wildcards so you'd have to write a
separate rule for every single image file. Once you've downloaded
UrlRewritingNet, you'll be able to re-write URLs with a certain "shape"
just as you want.

However, what you MUST remember is that you can't re-write .jpeg files
without getting access to the IIS MMC. Instead, you'll need to re-write
files that match "/blah.ashx" to "/images/ImageHandler.ashx?n=blah". In
your web.config, this means having something like this for the
UrlRewritingNet configuration...

<urlrewritingnet rewriteOnlyVirtualUrls="true" compileRegex="true"
xmlns="http://www.urlrewriting.net/schemas/config/2006/02" >
<rewrites>
<add virtualUrl="^~/(.*).ashx"
destinationUrl="~/images/ImageHandler.ashx?n=$1" />
</rewrites>
</urlrewritingnet>

I hope this helps! Once you get it working it's great.

Phil
Max2006 wrote:

Hi,

I am using a asp.net hosting service and I don't have access to IIS MMC.

I would like to implement a URL rewriting service so all urls with shape:

http://domainname.com/nnnn.jpeg

get redirected to:

http://domainname.com/images/ImageHandler.aspx?n=nnnn

Can I do that just by using web.config?

Any link to url re-writing article would be a great help.

Regards,
Max

[Walter Wang [MSFT]]

Hi Max,

I'm afraid that's not possible to rewrite a path ended with an extension
that is not mapped to ASP.NET engine in IIS. If you take a look at an
ASP.NET web site's "Application Settings" in its IIS property page (click
on "Configuration" button to see the Application Mappings), you will see
extensions such as .aspx, .config are mapped to use aspnet_isapi.dll. For
extensions are not mapped, IIS will serve them directly. Since you're
asking how to rewrite the path of a .jpeg file, which is normally not
mapped, I think it cannot be done.

For extensions do mapped to ASP.NET, you can find a URL rewriter
implementation here:

#URL Rewriting with ASP.NET - The Code Project - ASP.NET
http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/URLRewriter.asp
Demonstrates the use of regular expression-based URL Rewriting, similar to
mod_rewrite with ASP.NET

Sincerely,
Walter Wang (wa****@online.microsoft.com, remove 'online.')
Microsoft Online Community Support

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