I’m feeling inspired and I’d like to share a technique we’ve implemented in Sitecore to address a URL mapping from our legacy site that we wanted to carry over to the new beautiful Littelfuse.com. The challenge is to carry over all of our series URLs that have been published in our datasheets, we currently have a lot of series and having to create a manual mapping for those could be really tedious. It has the format of http://www.littelfuse.com/series/series-name.html, for instance, http://www.littelfuse.com/series/flnr.html. It would have been easier if we have our information architecture defined like this but that would have been too easy. I took a solution that is 2-fold. First, I need to create a URL rewrite rule using the IIS URL Rewrite Module 2.0. Secondly, we need to implement a handler that will take care of the actual lookup of the actual series. It will be amazing after we’ve gone over the details. Let’s start with the URL rewrite. Create a new blank rule, you can name it with anything you wish. The key part here to talk about is the Pattern and the Action groups. The Pattern is nothing but regex. Basically, I’m telling it to match the regex I have defined. In the Action group, I am telling it what to do, in this case, rewrite to the redirect.aspx webform. In this implementation, I will be using Rewrite instead of redirect so the URL sticks in the browser. If you opt to use Redirect, then the URL bar will display the new URL our webform will redirect to. Let me explain one small thing, the (\w+) in my Pattern group’s regex, will actually translate to {R:1} in my Action’s group. This is where the magic begins. Now let’s see what our Redirect.aspx contains. Remember our {R:1} above which becomes the query string variable s? This are basic .Net code. The only thing that you will probably ask is the LFSearch class. It’s our own implementation of addressing finding items by using a field search, we supply the fieldname, the value of the field, the template name of the item we are after, and the value of true or false if we want to do an exact search, or not. If eureka, then redirect to that item’s Path (Url). If not, tell the user tough luck, here’s the 404 page as a consolation. Amazing, ain’t it?
