[thelist] query string manipulation

Steven Gongage sgon at osceola.org
Fri Sep 7 10:14:12 CDT 2001


I'm building a site from the ground up in Coldfusion 5 on a 2k server running IIS 5.  I'm in the first stage of development right now where I'm testing ideas and playing with new toys before we get into the heavy stuff.  I came across an article about how to "hide" query strings by replacing all "&" and "=" with "/", in other words making the entire URL look like a long path.

Example:
http://www.blah.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=querystringssuck&pageaction=addrecord&var1=123
http://www.blah.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/querystringssuck/pageaction/addrecord/var1/123

Why would I be interested in this?  For one, I'm developing based on the Fusebox model and using query strings to decide the page to show really pisses of search engines.  Second, they're ugly to the users (not that that is a real reason for the headache involved).  Third, it looks interesting.

The problem comes when I use this new URL it tries to actualy go to that path.  The article I read on this explains how to get it to work on Apache by saying anything that has index.cfm should be read by index.cfm and therefore ignores the rest of the path, which is then translated by index.cfm.  But in IIS I don't see any way of keeping it from resolving the URL and going to the full path other than defining all those "directories" and redirecting them individualy.  I'm going to have WAY too many directories to keep that strait.

Has anyone tried this on IIS 5?  Is it even possible?  If not, any alternatives?  Your feedback would be VERY helpful to me.  

Thanks,
SteveG
Webmaster
Osceola County IT





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