Question

I am using ASP.NET C#.

How do I implement URL re-writing procedure that is similar to StackOverflow.com?

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/358630/how-to-search-date-in-sql 

Also, what is the meaning of values such as ‘358630’ in the URL? Is this the question ID (the basis for which they use to fetch the data from the table)? Whatever it is, in my application I am identifying records using an ‘ID’ field. This field is an identity column in an SQL table. Right now, my URLs are like the following:

http://myweb.com/showdetails.aspx?id=9872 

But I’d like them to appear like:

http://myweb.com/showdetails/9872/my_question_title 

Or:

http://myweb.com/9872/my_question_title 

Or whatever the best way, which will taste good to search bots.

My application is hosted on Go Daddy‘s shared hosting service, and I feel that no customized ASP.NET ‘HTTP module’ or no customized DLL for URL re-writing is working on their server. I tried many samples but no luck yet!

I found that Stack Overflow is hosted on Go Daddy (shared hosting?). Maybe Stack Overflow’s method will work for me.

Answer 1

SO is using ASP.NET MVC. You really need to read in details how MVC URL rewriting works, but the gist of it is that the ‘questions’ part in the URL is the name of the Controller class (which roughly corresponds to the ‘showdetails’ in your URL) and the number is a ID parameter for the default action on that Controller (same as the parameter ‘id’ in your URL).