Gildner Solutions

ASP.NET 4.0 URL routing 404 problems with IIS7

Filed under SEO

As I described before, I love the new routing feature in ASP.NET 4.0.  I succesfully converted my code from Intelligencia over to the built in routing.  The site ran great locally, but when I deployed to IIS7, I got 404's on every page that didn't have an extension.  Those pages were my routed product pages.

Some googling led to to add a line to my web.config file.  Here is is:

<system.webServer>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
  </system.webServer>

This apparently forces IIS to invoke the routing module.  I found no mention of this anywhere and was under the assumption I didn't have to modify any config files.  Hope this helps somebody.

Here are some sources where I found this:

http://forums.asp.net/t/1523639.aspx
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx

ASP.NET 4.0 URL routing

Filed under SEO

I was reading ScottGu's blog the other day and decided to give the new URL routing in ASP.NET 4.0 a try.  Got it to work great, just register the routes in global.asax and then pull out the data on the page where you need it.

        void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            // Code that runs on application startup
            RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
        }

        void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
        {
            routes.MapPageRoute("product-browse", "product/{name}_{id}", "~/Product.aspx");
            routes.MapPageRoute("category-browse", "category/{name}_{id}", "~/CategoryPage.aspx");
            routes.MapPageRoute("brand-browse", "brand/{name}_{id}", "~/BrandPage.aspx");
            routes.MapPageRoute("search", "search/{*searchTerms}", "~/Search.aspx");
        }

Above, I registered a route called product-browse where a page like http://mysite.com/product/some-great-toy_12 will get mapped to my Product.aspx page.  Inside Product.aspx, you would just need to retrive your id (and the name if you need it)

         string name = Page.RouteData.Values["name"] as string;
         int productId = Convert.ToInt32(Page.RouteData.Values["id"]);

Now, I have the productId, pulled right off the URL without using querystrings like I've used in the past.

I like it!