Developer forum

steffen@convince.dk wrote:

Hi,

I wonder if there has been made a change in the way requests of non-existing URL's are handled?

 

The problem is:

On www.ccllabel.dk the top flash looks for a specific file in the file archive. The file is named "banner_X.swf" (where "X" is the ID of the current page).

If the file doesn't exist the top flash loads the file "banner_default.swf". And this worked fine until recently.

 

Now, when the file doesn't exist and the top flash therefore receives an error page, it thinks that the error page is a .swf file and tries to load it, which results in a blank top (as seen on this page: http://www.ccllabel.dk/Default.aspx?ID=6).

 

The question is: Why suddenly this behaviour?

I'm wondering if Dynamicweb now handles requests of non-existing files different than when the top flash worked? Does anyone know anything about a change in that area?

Hi Steffen

There has been a change to the way Dynamicweb handles non existing files. Untill recently, Dynamicweb would redirect to the 404 page specified in control panel with first a 302 status code and the page that got redirected to with a code 200. This only applied for files a .net extension like .aspx, .ashx and so on.

That gave some unwanted things on searchengines that crawled pages that did not exists. This has now been changed so instead Dynamicweb returns the 404 page specified in control panel with a 404 status code. The big difference is it is now done for all extensions except gif, jpg, png, css and js which simply sends out a normal 404 status and a standard Dynamicweb 404 message. I've just added .swf to the list.

So to sum things up: Before the change if a .swf did not exist the server would return a 404 status code and the default message from the server. Now it returns a 404 code and the page specified in control panel. After the update package it will send a 404 and the content of the standard Dynamicweb 404 message. See the difference here:

http://www.dynamicweb.dk/doesnotexist.gif

http://www.dynamicweb.dk/doesnotexist.swf

Both will be the same after the update package.

The status code has not changed, so I dont know what you have been looking at to see if a swf does not exist?