SEO friend urls for spring mvc application - spring

Question

I have an application with urls like site.com/article/1/title.htm
I have #RequestMapping /article/{id}/{title}.htm that server this request and gets the article.
What I am looking achieve is to have a url like site.com/title.htm but cant think of a way to do that using Spring MVC because I need id of the article. any ideas? Thanks in advance

Answer 1

When you create an article, you need to create the SEO-friendly URL also and persist it, along with the article. Now you need to have a repository method that allows you to retrieve articles by permalink, and a Spring MVC endpoint that calls that repository method.
Using the title may not be a good idea, as the title is usually not URL-friendly, and may eventually be non-unique. But it is a good idea to use the title as the input for the permalink.
Here's a sample permalink algorithm:
Take the title
replace all occurrences of one or more space or punctuation with a single dash
replace all non-ascii characters with their ascii neighbors
check whether that permalink already exists
if it does, add a counter
This is how the read path could look like:
#Autowired
private ArticleRepository ar;
#RequestMapping(value="/article/{id}/{ignored}") #ResponseBody
public Article getByIdAndIgnorePermalink(#PathVariable String id, #PathVariable String ignored){
return ar.getById(id);
}
#RequestMapping(value="/article/{title}.html") #ResponseBody
public Article getByPermalink(#PathVariable String permalink){
return ar.getByPermalink(permalink);
}

Answer 2

There is no way send hidden id obviously, so it has to be done through a permalink of the article or simply via title, to achieve site.com/title.html you need to get rid of all the fixed bits by adding this request mapping rule:
#RequestMapping(value = "/**/{articleTitle}.html"
but to get the article you can obviously use id as its not there in the URL and have to work with that articleTitle or generate a permalink as suggested by #Sean above.