Question

We are using the Intelligencia URLRewriting module for asp.net with version 2.0 of the framework and IIS6. Our URLs typically have no extension.

I understand that IIS6 cannot really deal with this situation without a blanket wildcard (which causes other problems).

However, it works! Sometimes. At other times (e.g. on one dev’s machine, and on my machine when I point a different virtual directory at the app) it doesn’t. By ‘it doesn’t work’ I mean the configured HttpModules never even get hit.

Can anyone explain this?

Thanks.

Answer 1

So it turns out what was happening was the following:

• request comes in to (say) http://website/products/productid
• IIS can’t find this hence we get a 404
• by chance we have a custom error page set up in IIS for 404s
• this error page sticks the referring URL on the end of the 404 error.aspx page

• so we get a redirect coming into asp.net along the lines of:

  http://website/error.aspx?404;http://website/products/productid

• our URLRewriting regexes were now set up in such a way that they discarded the error.aspx bit and dealt with http://website/products/productid as if it were the actual URL

• so asp.net renders http://website/product.aspx?id=productid as requested!

I guess this could prove to be a useful kludge for someone, but we’re moving to an isapi filter. One heads-up is that this will by default lead to a tight loop of redirects!