Hello,
I posted this at the end of an existing forums post, but I'll post it again here as a feature request. Nuno Aguiar and I spent some time diagraming some options that we believe would be valuable.
Non-goal
- Complex pattern based matching. We agree that URL Rewrite is the best tool for that. (however, there may be opportunities over time to incorporate some more powerful options, but it's not the key goal right now.)
Goals/Requests:
- To support pretty much every static URL option, including mapping to pages, products, files, product groups.
- To conclude some pattern matching too.
- It can continue to use the 404 handler so that processing is post every else, so it won't have a performance hit. We have a suggestion to give some tooltips when an existing mapping clashes with a redirect rule though.
- Have an import tool that will try its best to match the URL with the Default.aspx?ID= pattern. This gives users the ability to start with a spreadsheet to build long lists of redirects based on the friendly URL, without having to figure out the ID for each one. We have end customers building these spreadsheets all the time, and we want to make this easier for them. Then, on import, it will turn it into the Default.aspx?ID= pattern so that the redirect works after future page renames.
- A side benefit of all of this is that another feature can be added so that when products are renamed, their original URL is written to this table to keep historical URLs. This is a big problem today when products are renamed (even for a simple spelling difference) because there is no redirect from the old to the new.
- We show RegEx in the diagrams but that’s option for a next iteration. Even having just the static functionality would address most of the needs.
I've attached a doc that Nuno created (we both brainstormed on it). It has built-in comments, but let us know if you have any questions. It gives some UX suggestions that help explain our thoughts.
Redirects are a big topic for us on nearly every project, so we hope that these ideas are of interest to you too.
Thanks!
Scott