Boris Masis

At Cultural Care Au Pair we use Google Analytics to track the sucess of our campaigns both online and offline. Google provides a nice url builder tool that generates links tagged with our various campaign attributes. Here’s the problem though, the links end up looking like:

http://www.culturalcare.com/default.aspx?utm_source=testSource&utm_campaign=testCampaign

That’s quite an ugly url for something like a postcard campaign. Luckily umbraco includes a full url rewriter that can help us easily transform that into something like www.culturalcare.com/postcard

1. Configure IIS for wildcard application mapping. This allows ASP.NET to process extension-less urls (such as /postcard/):

• right click on the umbraco website and select properties
• go to the “home directory” tab and click “configuration”
• in the “wildcard application maps” insert the ASP.NET dll (something like C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll ) and un-check “verify that file exists”

2. Edit /config/UrlRewriting.config in your umbraco folder

• Change the top tag to ensure that you don’t have any conflicts with other extension-less urls (like /umbraco)

  <urlrewritingnet rewriteOnlyVirtualUrls="true"
  contextItemsPrefix="QueryString"
  defaultPage = "default.aspx"
  defaultProvider="RegEx"
  xmlns="http://www.urlrewriting.net/schemas/config/2006/07" ><rewrites>
  ...
  </rewrites>
  </urlrewritingnet>

• add your rewrite rules following the example in the file or the documentation at urlrewriting.net. For example, if I wanted to redirect /postcard/ to /default.aspx?utm_source=testSource&utm_campaign=testCampaign I would add the following rule:

  <add name="postcard"
  virtualUrl="^~/postcard/?$"
  redirect="Application"
  rewriteUrlParameter="ExcludeFromClientQueryString"
  destinationUrl="~/default.aspx?utm_source=testSource&amp;utm_campaign=testCampaign"
  ignoreCase="true"
  />

• Note that the & needs to be written as & in the destination url.
• If you’d like to redirect to a different domain, virtual url and redirect need to be specified accordingly:

  <add name="offsite"
  virtualUrl="^http\://(.*)my.domain/redirect/?$"
  redirect="Domain"
  rewriteUrlParameter="ExcludeFromClientQueryString"
  destinationUrl="http://offsitedomain.com"
  ignoreCase="true"
  />

Enjoy!