Generate pages or responses on the fly

[Guest]

Hi,

We have a need to create pages on the fly for ASP.NET applications based on
some string that the Url ends with. For example:
http://www.domain.com/SomePath/aabbccdd.

"aabbccdd" does not exist physically on the file system, but we'd like that
to be handled somehow as an ID, make a call to some other system to retrieve
data (Web Service, database etc.), and then generate a response page.

One way I am aware of is to use an HttpModule to handle the request and
interpret it accordingly. Note that we do not want to use query strings to
address search engine optimization concerns.

I would appreciate it if you can share you experience or any ideas that you
have.

Thanks,

Adnan

 

[MSDN]

Hi,

What if you pass your aabbccdd in a hidden field then generate what ever you
want on the fly.
I don't understand what you mean, when you say you don't want to pass in a
query string somepage.aspx?id=aabbccdd can you please explain.
I am willing to learn from you.

Ihttphandlers can look process any filename with a specific extension you
want.
aabbccdd.Adnan
bbccddaa.Adnan
http://www.domain.com/SomePath/aabbccddd.Adnan

SA

 

[Guest]

Hi SA

Thanks for your reply. The URL http://www.domain.com/SomePath/aabbccddd
could be found in a search engine so I cannot rely on the hidden field option.

Search engines tend to dislike pages with query strings; you can find them
in search results, but their ranking tends to be lower (one possible reason
is the engine would think the page's content is dependent on the ID, and
therefore it's dynamic and not static content).

In essense, we'd like http://www.domain.com/SomePath/aabbccddd to work the
same way as http://www.domain.com/SomePath/somepage.ext?id=aabbccddd.

We are using MCMS which has its own ISAPI filter that handles requests. So I
am assuming the IHttpHandler would need to take precedence over MCMS or
otherwise we have to rely on a 404 error code as a catch-all.

By the way, in MCMS, URLs are aliased and you can simply have this path
http://www.domain.com/SomePath/aabbccddd that either corresponds to a page
(posting) called aabbccdd (it's not a requirement to include an extension!)
or a folder (channel) with that name.

The question with using an IHttpHandler is overhead...probably I should
say...how much overhead is incurred by using http handlers and is there any
noticeable degredation in performance? (MCMS itself adds overhead since pages
are assembled dynamically)

Thanks SA!