Rewrite a dynamic URL to a new dynamic URL - mod-rewrite

I am new to the RewriteEngine and have not been able to find an answer to the following issue. I run an ecommerce site with an ever changing catalog of product skus. Our URLs are dynamic. The question is, what if I want to have a dynamic variable redirect to a different dynamic variable.
For instance, I want:
http://www.mydomain.com/product.jhtm?id=12345
to now go to:
www.mydomain.com/product.jhtm?id=78910
How can I do this through the .htaccess?
Thanks in advance.

You will need to use the External Rewriting Program feature of the RewriteMap directive. Effectively, you write an application in whatever language you want (as long as you make it executable), that reads in the original ID on STDIN, and then outputs the new one on STDOUT. You can then reference that application in your RewriteRules.
It may be easier to implement this kind of logic at your application layer, rather than in a .htaccess file, especially since the External Rewriting Program has to be running continously, rather than being called for each new rewrite.

You'll need to use RewriteMap with a map type of prg in order to have a script look up the original ID and return the new one. Don't forget that the query string can only be broken apart in RewriteCond.

Related

CodeIgniter router for joomla sef urls?

I wish to create a front-end for joomla using CodeIgniter. I prefer to make my own front-end that reads joomla database and I had my own "framework" to accomplish this, this is because I feel that joomla front-end is too heavy for high traffic websites, because it needs to accommodate for so many user needs, at the end you would really only use a small percentage of what joomla has to offer, yet a lot of unneeded core modules load and when you have a website with 300k visits per day, every bit of resource counts. And I like joomla because of its back-end and database structure.
Anyway, I'm looking to standardize a framework for joomla front-end using CodeIgniter instead of my own messy php code, the main issue for me is the ci router. In joomla I set sef url like these:
websitex.com/
websitex.com/category.html
websitex.com/category/subcat/123-alias.html
I'm looking for a router override that would allow me to process those urls. Basically, if any of the params has a number, then its for sure an article. If it doesn't, and its not index.php then its for sure a category or subcategory (if it exists).
And if I write this:
websitex.com/123 [OR]
websitex.com/category/123-alias.html
It would display the article with id 123. At least that's how it works in joomla and its what I'm trying to achieve here.
If anyone could point me in the right direction that would be great. Thanks in advance.
ADDED:
OK #ImranQamer comment left me thinking. What if I try to do it with conventional CI router? So I tried, and came up with this:
$route['default_controller'] = "controller/index";
$route['index'] = "controller/index";
$route[':num'] = "controller/article";
$route['(:any)/:num'] = "controller/article";
$route['(:any)'] = "controller/section";
I think it may work. I've run some tests and so far so good.
First and second line, if nothing is specified OR index.suffix (index.html) is the URI, then it goes to my controller index method.
Third line, if URI is a number (eg: /123.html) then it routes to controller/article.
Fourth line needs more testing, but apparently it will grab any URI that ends with a number (or number + suffix) and route it to controller/article. Still needs another rule to let article's title alias to be put in the URI (eg: /category/123-hello.html)
And last line, will treat the URI as one of the categories/section of the joomla site. In this controller though, I'm going to need to check if submitted URI corresponds to an existing section, in which case it gets displayed, otherwise, redirected to 404.
I'm gonna test this out for a while, but looks good so far.

codeigniter routing with variable segment

I've been reading the codeigniter manual about routing but I don't understand how to apply the feature to my situation.
I'm trying to design the following URI
example.com/shopName/product/2/description
example.com/shopName/product/2/gallery
Where shopName is the name of the shop (ie. different every time).=
I'm in the beginning of the project so my controllers are open to alterations.
I've been thinking of doing something like the structure below, as a workaround, but it is definitely not what would be ideal.
example.com/shop/pdesc/2
example.com/shop/pgallery/2
First change route like this:
$route['shopName/(:any)/(:num)/(:any)'] = 'shopname/$1/$2/$3';
You may change this as per your design.
Then create controllers. Read this guide for details. link

Custom profile URL for own site, been though various posts..!

I've been through a few similar posts,
Facebook Like Custom Profile URL PHP
Custom URL / Apache URL Rewriting
But its still not clear, the actual method/process is not available..
Guys , little more guidance would do a lot..
I would like to put forward the questions here:
Users should have a chance to decide what is their url, Just like in case of fb, twitter
for example: www.facebook.com/harry.inaction
I am using the linux, apache, mysql, php environment for this.
Users are identified based on their user id's which get created automatically when they join in
And I fail at the very first step, seriously I don't know get started.
Thanks
It's going to be impossible to put any details as an answer because you've got to build this system of yours and there's more than one way to do it. Design decisions will need to be made based on the way you want things to work and what you already have (they're going to have to work together in some way).
Say you've already got a system for creating users (and it sounds like you do) and you already have a system for viewing profiles. You'll need to extend this system so that you store an extra "my_vanity_url" field in your user table in your database. This field needs to be unique. When a user edits their profile, they have the option of changing this to whatever they want (limiting it to only letters and numbers and dashes for simplicity).
Next, when you display this profile, say it is via /profile.php, your code needs to check a few things.
First it needs to check how it's called, looking at $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] you can see either /user/some-vanity-name or /profile.php?u=1234.
If it's the latter, you need to redirect the browser, do a database lookup to see who the user with user_id 1234 is.
Pull the "my_vanity_url" column out of the database for this user and redirect the browser to /user/my_vanity_url_value (replacing my_vanity_url_value with the value of that column).
So now, if you go to http://your.domain.com/profile.php?u=1234, your browser gets redirected and the URL address bar will say http://your.domian.com/user/my_name.
Next, you need to be able to take that unique name and turn it back into the old ugly looking profile page. Two things need to happen here:
You need to extend your profile.php once more to take an optional vanity name as opposed to a user_id
You need to use mod_rewrite to internally route vanity names to /profile.php
For the first thing, you simply look for a different $_GET[] parameter instead of whatever it is for a user_id. Say it's called name: so look at $_GET['name'], see if it exists, if it does lookup the user in the user table whose vanity url name is $_GET['name']. Return the profile of that user.
For the second thing, you just need to put this in the appropriate place in your htaccess file in your document root:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/?user/([A-Za-z0-9-]+)/?$ /profile.php?name=$1 [L]
This is just an example for how to implement something like this. It may be completely inapplicable for what you have, but it should give you an idea of what you need to do.

Replacing the "X" in this url www.websitename.com/info.php?lid=X

Help please.
I am looking for the best way to replace the "X" (number) in this url
www.websitename.com/info.php?lid=x
the "x" is a numerical value - i would like to replace the "X" with the "name" field from my database.
Is mod rewrite the way to go? I have multiple urls of the same format (different "X" value of course at the end) that i wish to change to create more friendly urls by replacing the "X" with the corresponding value from the database field "name".
If mod rewrite is the way to go can anyone help out with recommended code to go in the htaccess?
Thanks in advance.
Totally edited: My previous answer was based on a misunderstanding of what you're trying to ask.
What you are asking is to create a friendly URL system. This is covered in many tutorials -- just search for "friendly URLs" and you'll find lots of resources.
Here's a summary of how it works...
To create friendly URLs for your site, you would need something like this in .htaccess (not sure if I got the RewriteRule right because this is completely off the top of my head, so google for a full-blown tutorial to verify):
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule /info/(.+) /info.php?name=$1
</IfModule>
This means a request to http://www.example.com/info/foo would be rewritten to http://www.example.com/info.php?name=foo.
Then you need to modify your application (in particular, the info.php file) to handle this new request format in which the name is given in the URL instead of the id.
Note that in this example, all names (e.g., "foo") must be unique. If any two items in your database have the same name, you're going to have problems. With this in mind, you might want to add a new field to your database table, which is a unique column containing a string using only alphanumeric characters and hyphens appropriate for use in a URL (this type of string is called a slug). You will basically use this slug instead of the id for database queries. Let's say you create an item named "The Discombobulator". When this item is created in your application, it should also create a slug along the lines of "the-discombobulator" and ensure it's unique. If you create a second item also called "The Discombobulator", your app might generate a slug for it like "the-discombobulator-2".
So, when someone requests http://www.example.com/info/the-discombobulator-2, mod_rewrite changes that to http://www.example.com/info.php?name=the-discombobulator-2 and hands it to your app. Your app gets the name parameter, which is "the-discombobulator-2" and looks that up in the database's slug field, and gets the matching record.
I think this is what you are looking for:
http://www.roscripts.com/Pretty_URLs_-_a_guide_to_URL_rewriting-168.html

Using and hiding default class

This is my first time getting my hands dirty with CI so I'm getting a little confused.
I'm wanting to accomplish a couple things with my question. First of all, I'd like to always use the default controller without having it to appear in the url. For example, I created a new class named after my site (Example.php) and that works fine. However, if I want to call the search function in my controller I then have to go to example.com/index.php/example/search/.
The second thing I want to accomplish is when I run a search I'll get a nice looking url like so: example.com/search/This+is+a+search (I haven't gotten to removing the index.php portion but I know to use a htaccess). I'm not worried about the actual mechanics of the search, just that I'd like to format the url in this way.
I originally experimented with using a Search class but that found that it doesn't allow me put the search in the url because the second parameter should be a function and not the extra stuff.
Thanks for any help.
In application/config/routes.php file add $route to redirect everything to your controller.
Something like this:
$route['([^\/]+)'] = 'content/index/$1';
$route['([^\/]+)\/([^\/]+)'] = 'content/index/$1/$2';
This will redirect urls like example.com/A and example.com/A/B to a controller named content. Parameters A and B will be passed to method index.

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