Question

I’ve a site, we are using ASP.NET 4.0, and right now our products content is managed like this

www.franko1.com/products.aspx?serie=2000

where the querystring serie is the product ID, so its value is taken and then the contents is extracted from the database.

Now for SEO reasons, we’ve been asked to change the urls, so now they have to look like this:

What the boss want                    | Current Urls
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
www.franko1.com/Relief_Valves         | www.franko1.com/products.aspx?serie=2000
www.franko1.com/Inline_Flame_Arrester | www.franko1.com/products.aspx?serie=1000
www.franko1.com/Vent_Hatch            | www.franko1.com/products.aspx?serie=3000

and so on …

Right now, we are using a masterpage and the products.aspx and as I said, we take the querystring serie and we show the content based on its value, I have no idea how to do this using asp.net, I have read about ISAPI_Rewrite but I was wondering if there is a technique to approach this without dealing with the IIS server….

Well I don’t know if I was clear, It is hard to explain,

Answer 1

No need for that. You can achieve this via routing (It’s not just for MVC).

Routing has been available as a stand alone module for a while now, but with ASP.Net 4.0 you can now use routing for WebForms just as easily as you can with MVC.

You will need to add some routing to your Global.asax

public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication
{

    protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
    }

    public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routeCollection)
    {
        routeCollection.MapPageRoute("Products", "Products/{Name}", "~/Products.aspx");
    }

}

And with that you can now reference the route values in your page like so:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    string prodName = Page.RouteData.Values["Name"].ToString();

    //Do lookup, etc...
}

Your URLs will end up looking like this:

http://www.domain.com/products/Relief_Valves
http://www.domain.com/products/Widgets
http://www.domain.com/products/TrashCans

etc..

Nice and easy… and clean!