How to use routes in epi-server

Bernard Quick

Vote:

I have searched the forums and no luck, so asking here.

In our current non epi-server MVC site, we can have one page, routed to, in many instances.

For example, we have 94 instances of a route, here are 4 examples below:

www.polaris.com/en-us/military/combat/mrzr-2/quote
www.polaris.com/en-us/military/combat/mrzr-4/quote
www.polaris.com/en-us/military/combat/sportsman-mv-850/quote
www.polaris.com/en-us/military/combat/sportsman-mv-850-le/quote

I don't want to have to create the Qoute page 94 times. How can I take advantage of mvc routes in epi-server to allow me to build this page once, but refernce it as we do today?

There must be an aritcle or direction on how to do this, I just cannot find it.

Thanks,

-Bernie

#143502

Jan 25, 2016 22:16

valdis

Vote:

I think partial routing is something you might be looking for - http://world.episerver.com/documentation/Items/Developers-Guide/Episerver-CMS/8/Routing/Partial-routing/Partial-routing/.

#143513

Jan 25, 2016 23:17

Scott Reed

Vote:

Usually when my agency rebuilds a site in EpiServer there are routes that need to be mapped to the CMS. We usually use Helicon Ape at the IIS level which is a very powerful rewrite engine and kicks in before EpiServer. This way you can define all of your routes and url paramters that you need to handle and rewrite them to an EpiServer URL that will handle them. For example in previous sites with products we have had /products/cc001-green-carpet/ which has been set up to redirect to the /products/ pages changing the latter parts of the URL to querystring paramters. These can then be read by the dynamic page at /products/ and be handled.

In your scenario you could have www.polaris.com/en-us/military/combat/ with a single EpiServer housed page and the rest of the URL rewritten to a querystring URL that you can read and handle via EpiServer. You could create custom code to do this or create a number of blocks and have the EpiServer personalisation due the work of presenting any changing content.

The reason we do this at IIS level rather than any rewriting in EpiServer or a CMS is usually performance is not great at the application level whereas we've used Helicon for 50,000+ rewrites with no performance issues

#143518

Edited, Jan 26, 2016 9:41

Daniel Ovaska

Vote:

You actually have 2 problems. One is allowing the user to have multiple urls to the same content.

The other is SEO.

Showing the same content in many places can be solved in Episerver by creating shortcuts or fetch data from. MVC routing can also be customized but its a little tricky and wont solve the SEO problem you will get instead.

Having a single page and setting up 301 redirects is probably your best option. For small amounts of urls you can do this on iis level by using urlrewrite module or similar.

For larger sites you can take a look at SEO manager which makes it possible to both import your old urls and using regex to setup 301s

#143557

Jan 26, 2016 17:48