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It sounds like a huge feature with little value :)

When and why would you prefer to handle this in DW instead of IIS (or other hosting environment)? Can you describe some common scenarios?

Which kind of redirect rules do you want to manage in DW?

• Should it be possible to register a long list of regular expression patterns and replacements in DW?

• Should it be possible to edit complex redirect rules in the same way as you can do in IIS?

• Something else? Can you provide examples?

Hi Morten,

It sounds like a huge feature with little value :)

I don't disagree, but thought there might be a simple/quick way to at least expose the rules from web.config.

When and why would you prefer to handle this in DW instead of IIS (or other hosting environment)? Can you describe some common scenarios?

In +90% of our projects we have to implement 301 redirects. We can't have a single approach /person to do this. Customers will handle some in Url Redirects and some has to be made by a programmer with access to web.config.

One of the common settings is 301 redirects for products which has to be a pattern (considering we handle thousands of skus with every project)

Some customers don't even give us access to web.config in Production servers, which complicates matters.

Should it be possible to register a long list of regular expression patterns and replacements in DW?

That would be great for sure. Being accessed in the UI means we can also deploy redirect rules with the Deployment Tool and/or commit them to VCS

Should it be possible to edit complex redirect rules in the same way as you can do in IIS?

I don't have a clear picture where to draw the line. I definately was not thinking of 100% parity with IIS. I was really looking to be a step closer to managing it in DW, just like other platfoms can do, but mostly to allow for something we could commit to git and deploy

Something else? Can you provide examples?

Our common scenarios are:

• Patterns for product urls
  we set them to ID=0&ProductId=0 so we don't need to handle friendlyUrls
  in the past we even had to redirect to a dummy page to get the primary groupid
   
• Patterns for "blogs"/"articles" urls

Regarding "something else", we usually do bulk imports to Url Redirects. We ask customers to give us an excel file with 2 columns, the old url, and then we populate the new one and import it. The list of old urls is basically their most important ones (excluding the ones we can set through patterns) which they might get from Google Analytics.

Does that answer all of your questions?

Nuno Aguiar

Hi guys,

I have asked for something similar a while ago. mAybe not as advanced, but along the same lines or generated by the same need.

We often have situations where we have to use explicit URLs instead of interface-selected URLs.
DW by default adds a /Files in front of any link starting with "/".

This change alone can solve a lot of time.

I guess you guys should try and implement a redirect list with 3000 URLs.

And one of the issues is that not always you can get easy access to IIS or you don't want to assign a highly skilled resource to the task.

You cannot let just anybody messing with IIS redirects or editing of Web.config file.

I for one see the benefits of having the ability to import or add custom URLs in the redirect list.

If Nuno and I are the only ones that see some value in it, I agree it is a huge request with a small benefit.

Thank you,

Adrian