Friendly URLs with ISAPI Rewrite

I posted recently that we had modified Product Cart in order to use ISAPI rewritting to make our URL's much cleaner. After getting several request as to how we did it I thought I would post a few highlights of what had to be done for the community. I am not a professional programmer so anything I have done could possibly be improved on. I HIGHLY recommend that Product Cart add this to their future versions.

The below information will convert:
domain.com/category/uniquename
domain.com/products/uniquename
domain.com/home/uniquename

into

domain.com/pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=uniquename
domain.com/pc/viewprd.asp?idproduct=uniquename
domain.com/pc/viewcontent.asp?idpage=uniquename


1.     Install Helicon Tech's ISAPI Rewriter program - www.helicontech.com - You will need either a dedicated server or a hosted server with some type of ISAPI rewriter installed.

2.     Create some Rewrite Rules based on their instructions. If you need help use their support forum it is great. Mine are similar to this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Host} ^(.*\.)?domain\.com$
RewriteRule ^/category/([^/.?]+)/?(?:\?(.*))?$ /pc/viewCategories.asp?idCategory=$1?2&$2: [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^/products/([^/.?]+)/?(?:\?(.*))?$ /pc/viewPrd.asp\?idproduct=$1?2&$2: [NC]
RewriteRule ^/home/([^/.?]+)/?(?:\?(.*))?$ /pc/viewcontent.asp?idpage=$1&$2: [NC,L]
RewriteRule ^/?(?:\?(.*))?$ /pc/home.asp?idpage=&$1?2&$2: [NC,L]

3.     Modify the "products", "categories" and "pccontents" database tables and add a column called something like "Unique_Name". Doesn't matter the name just so you know it. I have created a way to add custom fields pretty quickly to the control panel for editing. Assign each product, categories and content page a unique name.

4.     Modify "pc/viewprd.asp", "pc/viewcategories.asp" and "pc/viewcontent.asp" and look for the main query that gets the data for the page from the database and add something link this to the query. You are basically looking up the information you need by a "Unique_Name" OR by the standard "D".
WHERE (((idCategory)="&pTempIntSubCategory&")) or (((uniqueName)='"&pTempIntSubCategory&"'))

5.     Now you need to change how ProductCart displays URL's on the displayed pages. I created 3 functions that did this that looks similar to this. If a "Unique_Name" is passed it will rewrite the link. If not, it will show the standard ProductCart link. You will need to go through all the ProductCart code and decide which links you want to modify. Be sure to comment well. The functions for each are similar to below (Mine is not exact as I am doing other stuff as well in the function which you want need):

'strCatName is your unique_name and str_pldCategory is the category id
Function createCatlink(strCatName,str_pIdCategory)
If strCatName <> "" then
     createCatlink="../category/" & strCatName
else
     createCatlink="viewcategories. asp?idcategory=" & str_pIdCategory
End if
End Function

6.     One thing that took me a while to figure out was why my Stylesheets and images stopped working. I realized that I the rewriting was changing the base path to which everything referenced. So I add this to the top of header.asp.

if request("hidebase") = "" then
     If Request.ServerVariables ("HTTPS") = "off" then
           response.write "<base href='"&scStoreURL&"/pc/'>"
           else
           response.write "<base href='"&scSSLUrl&"/pc/'>"
     end if
End if

Now I am sure that I have missed something above as I did it almost a year ago. It took about 2 weeks to get it working just right. Early Impact could probably implement it much quicker since I had never seen the code before starting. I would recommend that if you are not very comfortable with programming that you don't tackle this as it may be cheaper to find a programmer or beg Early Impact to add it to a future release I believe this is the absolute best way to do URL rewriting and would highly recommend it to Product Cart for addition (Haven't I said that already:)) Hope this helps.

I would be very interested in this add-on.  Ability to have PC do SEO friendly URLs out of the box would make this cart just about perfect.

Another ProductCart customer recently used the approach detailed in the following document, and just reported to us that his site's search engine placement has improved dramatically as a result:

http://www.earlyimpact.com/forum/uploaded_files/earlyimp/200 7-11-17_175837_pcSEP_v3.11_111607.zip

This approach does not require the implementation of an ISAPI rewrite component.