url rewriting help

[slippers]

Hi,

Are there any help files on how to use the url rewriting feature in helm? I have a site where the product pages are www.site.com/products/default.asp?id=222 and it would be nice to change them to www.site.com/productcategory/productname/

Also, in my website, do I link to the querystring url or can I link to the better versions? I am new to this rewriting lark.

Thanks

[RFH Reseller: nick]

To make an url like www.site.com/productcategory/productname/ appear to your web application as ?id=222 you would need to do one of two things:

• define each possible case seperately, matching every pretty URL to its ?id= URL equivalent (tedious stuff if you ask me, and hard to maintain)
• map the pretty URL to something consistent like ?cat=productcategory&prod=productname, and then use logic in your application to work out what id any specified cat and prod are for.

I'll give you a third option to, and that is to use firendly URLs that take the form www.site.com/key1/value1/key2/value2/, you can then use a single easy rewrite rule to map it to www.site.com/index.asp/key1/value1/key2/value2/, as then some easy logic in your application can break down the argument to it's constituent key=>value pairs. The beauty of this is it leaves the keys flexible.

Finally, yes, whatever format you choose for your URLs, it would defeat the point if you don't use it for your links.