[thelist] ASP question

Madhu Menon madhu at asiacontent.com
Wed Aug 23 11:07:47 CDT 2000


OK, I tried to think of explaining this in the subject line. Couldn't think 
of anything. Forgive me.

The problem:

I can dynamically generate stories from a database like so:

www.mysite.com/ShowArticle.asp?ArticleID=4598

But... search engines will usually not index anything that has a parameter 
in it. Or worse, they'll index it but only return the part before the "?" 
as the URL. So the above URL would become "www.mysite.com/ShowArticle.asp" 
which is pretty useless.

Some email programs will not show hyperlinks with a "?" in it properly too.

What I want is to have URLs like this:

www.mysite.com/Articles/4598.asp

But... the file should not physically exist as a file, rather I want some 
way to "intercept" this URL, actually get ShowArticle.asp to display the 
contents of record no. 4598 and serve it up.

One way to do this would be to put this routine in a custom 404 error 
handler page and have that redirect to the correct page, but I don't want 
to do that because it mean redirecting between a couple of pages, making 
things very slow.

So, does anyone have an idea of how I could do this? I'm running Win2K and 
IIS 5.0

Thanks,

Madhu

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Madhu Menon
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