Help! ASP.NET URL rewriting expertise needed!

Teh Russ

I'm working on an ASP.NET site at the moment that needs to direct people to the right page from a friendly URL...

For example, the actual page address is this:
http://www.thesite.com/themarket/page.aspx?id=x

... and people need to be able to access it from a URL like this:
http://www.thesite.com/themarket/theproductname

... all the friendly page names are in the pages database, so I'll need to query that to find the appropriate page to direct them to. There are three different "themarket" pages, each with totally different designs.

Now, I was going to do this with a custom 404 page, but whenever you enter a URL like the friendly one above, I get an XML error, saying "not well-formed". I assume the default.aspx page in the relevant "themarket" directory must be intercepting the request and trying to do something with it, but I don't know how to change this behaviour. I know there's supposed to be a better way to do it using code in the global.asax page, but I have no idea how to do it.

This is my first proper ASP.NET site - I only recently graduated to .NET from Classic ASP, so most of these concepts are very new to me.

Any help anyone can offer would be appreciated... I am completely flummoxed!

mewso

Scott Guthrie's post on this is worth a look - http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/02/26/tip-trick-url-rewriting-with-asp-net.aspx

Teh Russ

Sorted. Thanks so much, Musician!

Evil Phil

Didn't read Scott Gu's blog post but there is an easy way to remap a URL in asp.net using the web.config although it does have some limitations.

http://www.developer.com/net/asp/article.php/3581326