Question

I am using ColdFusion 9.1.2.

I set up a new web site that parses the query string after the domain name and slash. What is left is the MusicianID and then a string used to help with SEO. The URL looks like this:

http://awesomealbums.info/?1085/jim-croce
http://awesomealbums.info/?1077/james-taylor

When I share it using Facebook, Facebook removes the question mark and encodes it. They can’t seem to parse it so they display it as the home page.

These throw an error that I can’t control:

http://awesomealbums.info/1085/jim-croce
http://awesomealbums.info/1077/james-taylor

I notice that StackOverlfow and other sites are able to exclude the question mark that starts a query string. I would like to do the same. I, however, can’t change any IIS or CF Administrator settings. I need to code the solution. I’ve tried, but I get IIS telling me they can’t find the page.

I want my URLs to look like this:

http://awesomealbums.info/1085/jim-croce // same as above but no ?
http://awesomealbums.info/1077/james-taylor // same as above but no ?

Here’s the code that I am using right now to parse the URL and get the MusicianID.

 <cfscript>
QString = CGI.QUERY_STRING;
if (QString eq "") {
    include "Home.cfm";
} else if (QString eq "WhoAmI") {
    include "WhoAmI.cfm";
} else {
    IndexOfSlash = Find("/", QString);
    if (IndexOfSlash eq 5) {
        ThisID = left(QString, 4);
        if (isNumeric(ThisID)) {
            MusicianID = ThisID;
            include "Musician.cfm";
        }
    } else {
        location(url="http://www.awesomealbums.info" addtoken="false");
    }
}

How can I alter my site so that the question mark can be removed and the web server doesn’t get funky and I can parse out the query string?

Answer 1

The keyword you are looking for is URL rewriting. It has to happen on the web server, since you want to handle all requests in the top-level directory. If your web server is the Apache httpd, you can do it like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/(\d{4})/([\w-]+)$ /?$1/$2 [L]

or

RewriteRule ^/(\d{4})/([\w-]+)$ /Musician.cfm?MusicianID=$1 [L]