URL redirection dilema

mjquinno

Hi guys,

I am developing a site and its php mysql. Anyways they have a list of users that can be displayed on the site. so for a user (eg john smith) the url is

http://www.mysite.com/user.php?id=143

Now the client said would it be possible to have john smith in the url like so

http://www.mysite.com/johnsmith

i know that this normally means that a folder johnsmith will need to be there. is there a script or a way that will catch johnsmith and query the database and give it the original url.(of course the name johnsmith as the reference will be stored in the database)

If you have any question or I havent been clear about anything just ask.

Thanks for looking.
M

Karoma

well,you could have Error 404 redirect...
otherwise, a better solution is subdomains if their provided= http://johnsmith.mysite.com

edit:
actually, do you have server-side scripting on the hosting (PHP,JSP,ASP,etc.)
Possibly script to check HTTP headers?
really not good ideas. subdomain remains my fav.

dahamsta

There's nothing out of the box to do it, but if the webserver is Apache all you have to do is use mod_rewrite or ErrorDocument to map these requests to a script that will query MySQL for the id of the relevant name, and then use user.php to deliver the right details.

I'd recommend using mod_rewrite, because otherwise genuine 404 errors will be trapped by the script. However in that case it would be a good idea to move user queries to a separate namespace (like site.com/users/username) to prevent conflicts.

adam

mjquinno

thanks to both of you guys,

Adam but if the user was not in the database woudnt that not mean that it was a genuine 404 error and therefore show the 404 error page nad not redirect?

Sorry if this i gone over my head monday :mad:

dahamsta

mjquinno wrote:

Adam but if the user was not in the database woudnt that not mean that it was a genuine 404 error and therefore show the 404 error page nad not redirect?

Both would be genuine 404 errors, you'd be using this script to handle ALL 404 errors. You could have the script output a 404 message if nothing was found in the database, but that's a hack. (The entire solution is a hack, but a common one.)

Using RewriteRules is the better approach, this is the kind of thing mod_rewrite was designed for.

adam

mjquinno

O right,

Thats great thanks for the info. Ill get up to speed on mod_rewrite

Thanks again,

M