muonlab

For those of you still running IIS6 who would like to have nice SEO friendly URLs, one option is to use ISAPI Rewrite.

First, add a “.mvc” handler mapping to the asp.net dll as per Phil Haacks post.

Obviously you’ll need ISAPI Rewrite installed, then you can create the following .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
AllowOverride All

# Ignore Assets folder
RewriteRule ^assets/(.*?)$ /assets/$1 [NC,L]

# Rewrite everything else to have .mvc on the end of the controller name
RewriteRule ^([^/]*)(/(?:.*?)*)?$ /$1.mvc$2 [NC,L]

I keep all my CSS, images and javascript under the /assets folder. If you have these elsewhere, you probably want to modify the first rewrite rule for your specific location.

N.B. you can probably ignore these folders in a much more elegant way, perhaps with a RewriteCond on the 2nd Rule. I’m not a master of this syntax yet so this will do for the time being, it works!

Some additional rules you may also want are the following:

# Rewrite favicon
RewriteRule ^favicon.ico(.*?)$ /assets/images/icons/favicon.ico [NC,L]

# Rewrite appleicon
RewriteRule ^apple-touch-icon.png(.*?)$ /assets/images/icons/apple-touch-icon.png [NC,L]

# Ignore robots.txt
RewriteRule ^robots.txt(.*?)$ /robots.txt [NC,L]

Adding the following to your global.asax:

protected void Application_BeginRequest()
{
	if (this.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath.Contains(".mvc"))
		this.Context.RewritePath(this.Request.Url.PathAndQuery.Replace(".mvc", string.Empty));
}

means you don’t need to have the .mvc in your route configurations, which keeps things nice and tidy!