URLs are the bridges that connect our little island of a website to the bigger continent known as the Internet. Preserving URL integrity is the utmost importance for providing an excellent experience for new and existing users alike. Sadly, from a development and management standpoint, keeping old paths working for a new site can be a real pain in the butt. In this post, we’ll show you how to use redirect maps to create a lookup dictionary for old URL paths. This post will also help you preserve query string parameters.

Configuration

We started by exploring the Microsoft documentation site around rewrite maps. For rewrite maps, you will need to make sure you are running your site on Internet Information Services with the rewrite module.

What you will need in your web.config is a rewriteMaps section under system.webserver/rewrite with the rewrite maps section containing the old URL paths and their new destinations.

<rewrite>
    <rewriteMaps>
        <rewriteMap name="StaticRewrites" defaultValue="">
            <add key="/one" value="/new-one" />
            <add key="/two" value="/new-two" />
        </rewriteMap>
    </rewriteMaps>
</rewrite>

This rewrite map then needs a subsequent rule to match the URL path.

<rule name="Redirect rule for StaticRewrites" stopProcessing="true">
    <match url=".*" />
    <conditions>
        <add input="{StaticRewrites:{URL}}" pattern="(.+)" />
    </conditions>
    <action type="Redirect" url="{C:1}" redirectType="Permanent"/>
</rule>

Note that the use of {URL} in our rule. The rule makes sure we look into the rewrite map using only the URL’s path. If you were to use anything else, you likely will not get a match. If you need to match on anything else, please look into the IIS documentation to understand your options.

Try it out and hopefully we’ve saved you some keystrokes :)

Published Jul 26, 2019 by

Director of Software Development

Lead Frontend Developer

Senior Software Developer

IIS

Azure

SEO

Regex Performance With and Without RegexOptions.C...

z-index Is Confusing, but It Doesn't Have to Be

Logging ASP.NET Web API 2 Failed Request Body to ...

Using forEach for IE 11

Understanding Dart Sass modules and namespaced va...

Autofac: Eager vs Lazy Construction During Regist...

Writing a Browser Compatible Date Input

Non Pro/Premier SendGrid Accounts May Have Issues...

Vue 3 Composition API

Upcoming Google Chrome SameSite Change Breaks Our...

A Case Of Newtonsoft.Json, TypeNameHandling.All, ...

Ordering of static fields in C# matters

Avoiding a LINQ FirstOrDefault mishap

Artifact Conference 2019

How to Work with NPM Packages Locally Using .tgz ...

Caching Git LFS in AppVeyor to Avoid Large GitHub...

UX/UI Solutions: Make Content Less Overwhelming.

Takeaways from An Event Apart

ChatOps at RIMDev Using Probot

Working At Work: This And Other Thoughts On High ...

IIS Rewrite Maps and Redirecting On Url Paths

Configuration

Comments

IIS Rewrite Maps and Redirecting On Url Paths

Configuration

UX/UI Solutions: Make Content Less Overwhelming.

Working At Work: This And Other Thoughts On High Availability

Our DevOps Journey: Release Branches, Highly Available Azure Web Apps, and Terraform

Hugo Error Pages With IIS In Windows Azure

Setting Azure Web App Slot Auto Swap Using ARM Templates and Terraform

Export CSV Table of All Azure Web Apps Configuration in Subscription

Comments