ASP.NET friendly urls with IIS7 HttpModule

from: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx

Using an HttpModule to Perform Extension-Less URL Rewriting with IIS7

The above HttpModule approach works great for scenarios where the URL you are re-writing has a .aspx extension, or another file extension that is configured to be processed by ASP.NET.  When you do this no custom server configuration is required - you can just copy your web application up to a remote server and it will work fine.

There are times, though, when you want the URL to re-write to either have a non-ASP.NET file extension (for example: .jpg, .gif, or .htm) or no file-extension at all.  For example, we might want to expose these URLs as our public catalog pages (note they have no .aspx extension):

http://www.store.com/products/Books
http://www.store.com/products/DVDs
http://www.store.com/products/CDs

With IIS5 and IIS6, processing the above URLs using ASP.NET is not super easy.  IIS 5/6 makes it hard to perform URL rewriting on these types of URLs within ISAPI Extensions (which is how ASP.NET is implemented). Instead you need to perform the rewriting earlier in the IIS request pipeline using an ISAPI Filter.  I'll show how to-do this on IIS5/6 in the Approach 4 section below.

The good news, though, is that IIS 7.0 makes handling these types of scenarios super easy.  You can now have an HttpModule execute anywhere within the IIS request pipeline - which means you can use theURLRewriter module above to process and rewrite extension-less URLs (or even URLs with a .asp, .php, or .jsp extension).  Below is how you would configure this with IIS7:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>

  <configSections>
    <section name="rewriter"
             requirePermission="false"
             type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.Configuration.RewriterConfigurationSectionHandler, Intelligencia.UrlRewriter" />
  </configSections>
 
  <system.web>
     
    <httpModules>
      <add name="UrlRewriter" type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule, Intelligencia.UrlRewriter" />
    </httpModules>
   
  </system.web>

  <system.webServer>

    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">
      <add name="UrlRewriter" type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule" />
    </modules>

    <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />

  </system.webServer>

  <rewriter>
    <rewrite url="~/products/(.+)" to="~/products.aspx?category=$1" />
  </rewriter>
  </configuration>

Note the "runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests" attribute that is set to true on the <modules> section within <system.webServer>.  This will ensure that the UrlRewriter.Net module from Intelligencia, which was written before IIS7 shipped, will be called and have a chance to re-write all URL requests to the server (including for folders).  What is really cool about the above web.config file is that:

1) It will work on any IIS 7.0 machine.  You don't need an administrator to enable anything on the remote host.  It will also work in medium trust shared hosting scenarios.

2) Because I've configured the UrlRewriter in both the <httpModules> and IIS7 <modules> section, I can use the same URL Rewriting rules for both the built-in VS web-server (aka Cassini) as well as on IIS7.  Both fully support extension-less URLRewriting.  This makes testing and development really easy.

IIS 7.0 server will ship later this year as part of Windows Longhorn Server, and will support a go-live license with the Beta3 release in a few weeks.  Because of all the new hosting features that have been added to IIS7, we expect hosters to start aggressively offering IIS7 accounts relatively quickly - which means you should be able to start to take advantage of the above extension-less rewriting support soon.  We'll also be shipping a Microsoft supported URL-Rewriting module in the IIS7 RTM timeframe that will be available for free as well that you'll be able to use on IIS7, and which will provide nice support for advanced re-writing scenarios for all content on your web-server.