I have a a requirement to control the ability for a client to download images/files based on who they are. We are calling an action with a parameter that allows me to sub in data from session to finish a path, without putting the real path on the client. We then return a FileActionResult from the controller.
It was working. If we found the image, we could create a stream and serve the file, and if we could not, we returned a default image. But, we found that we could easily run into an issue where the stream was open when a new request was made, which resulted in an error. This could then turn into an issue where even the default image could not be downloaded.
I have looked around a lot and we have tested several methods, and these conflicts can still occur. I have started to think that maybe this is not an IO issue, but more of an, "I'm trying to do something wrong" issue.
Is there a way to intercept a call for a static resource, and then adapt the path if it is looking in a specific location, without imposing the rule on all request?
The closest I have found is when creating a View Expander, where I can re-interoperate the path of a called resource, but it is not the same. One is compiled, the other is not.
I don't have any code to show because the approach is uncertain, and unknow. Searches have proven difficult because the terms collide with well know solutions to topics that do not apply.
I am hoping that someone who is more knowledgeable can point me to a method that will treat files in a secure folder as if they are static resources once I have determined they are authorized to access the static resource.
I am using Identity, but I do not extend that identity to system access, nor will I. The only user allowed can be the IISUsr, per my client.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I am using WebClient to download a JSON file everytime my WP7 application loads. I am loading all the details in one shot and that too from a server endpoint serving this JSON. The obvious problem I faced was the caching. It was always loading the stale copy. But I tackled this issue by adding a dummy URL paramater at the end.
However, the JSON changes very rarely. So I still need to utilize the caching technique that the WebClient automatically uses. To do this I initially request a call to the server's JSON version something like, http://myserver/JSONVersion. This JSONVersion gets updated any time JSON is updated.
Once I get it, i append it to my url http://myserver/myjson.json?v=(JSONVERSION). This has solved my entire problem. However, I feel this is very ugly and has unnecessary excess code+logic floating around. I am hoping the HTTP Cache headers have a work around similar to the one that I am having. If so, please let me know.
Apparently I found no better solution than the one I currently have.
I need to login to a site, then hit a certain URL about a thousand times (with different params, of course).
The URL is something this:
http://www.foo.com/bar.asp?id=x ' where x is the ID
Of course if I simply hit the URL without being logged, it will fail.
I am not very familiar with this type of work, but I would imagine that whatever the method I choose, it would have to support cookies.
I was thinking that I could create a winform app with a browser control and somehow drive it, but that seems like a massive overkill.
Is there a better way?
If you are determined to do it in your code itself then i dont think any thing is stopping you from doing that.
HttpRequest and HttpResponse classes has pretty much everything you need to do that.
Moreover if you are concerned about cookies then you could always store received cookies in a database or file and send them with every subsequent request.
If you want to know the structure of the Http Request like a GET request then look here.
Also you can make your request look like a Request from browser by specifying the Proper Request Headers...(However it doesn't work every time)
And all this can be done even in a console app
You may want to look into WCAT if you are mainly interested in how your server performs under load.
Using Python or PHP, you can use the libcURL library, I believe they both have bindings for these languages. If not, just use the urllib2 module (for Python).
This is the scenario: I have a list of about 5000 URLs which have already been published to various customers. Now, all of these URLs' location has changed on my server side. The server is still the same though. This is a ASP.NET website with .NET3.5/C#.
My requirement is : Though the customers use the older source URL they should be redirected to the new URL without any perceived change or intermediate redirection message etc.
I am trying to make sense of the whole scenario:
Where would I put the actual mapping of Old URL to New URL -- in a database or some config. file or is there a better option?
How would I actual implement a redirect:
Should I write a method with Server.Transfer ot Response.Redirect?
And is there a best practice to it like - placing the actual re-routing in HTTPModules..or is it Application_BeginRequest?
I am looking to achieve with a best-practice compliant methodology and very low performance degradation, if any.
If your application already uses a database then I'd use that. Make the old URL the primary key and lookups should be very fast. I'd personally wrap the whole thing in .NET classes that abstracts it and allow you to create a Dictionary<string,string> of all the URLs which can be loaded into memory from the DB and cached. This will be even faster.
Definitely DON'T use Server.Transfer. Instead you should do a 301 Permanently Moved redirect. This will let search engines know to use the new URL. If you were using NET 4.0 you could use the HttpResponse.RedirectPermanent method. However, in earlier versions you have to set the headers yourself - but this is trivial.
Keep the data in a database, but load into ASP.NET cache to reduce access time.
You definitely want to use HTTPModules. It's the accepted practice, and having recently tried to do it inside Global.asax, I can tell you that unless you want to do only the simplest kind of stuff (i.e. "~/mypage.aspx/3" <-> "~/mypage.aspx?param1=3) it's much more complicated and buggy than it seems.
In fact, I regret even trying to roll my own URL rewriting solution. It's just not worth it if you want something you can depend on. Scott Guthrie has a very good blog post on the subject, and he recommends UrlRewriter.net or UrlRewriting.net as a couple of free, open-source URL rewriting solutions.
Good luck.
The urls on my site can become very long, and its my understanding that urls are transmitted with the http requests. So the idea came to compress the string in the url.
From my searching on the internet, i found suggestions on using short urls and then link that one to the long url. Id prefer to not use this solution because I would have to do a extra database check to convert between long and short url.
That leaves in my head 3 options:
Hashing, I don't think this is a option. If you want a safe hashing algorithm, its going to be long.
Compressing the url string, basically having the server depress the string when when it gets the url parameters.
Changing the url so its not descriptive, this is bad because it would make development harder for me (This is a 1 man project).
Considering the vast amount possible amount of OS/browsers out there, I figured id as if anyone else has tried this or have some clever suggestions.
If it maters the url parameters can reach 100+ chars.
Example:
mysite.com/Reports/Ability.aspx?PlayerID=7737&GuildID=132&AbilityID=1140&EventID=1609&EncounterID=-1&ServerID=17&IsPlayer=True
EDIT:
Let me clarify atm this is NOT breaking the site. Its more about me learning to find a good solution ( Im well aware this is micro optimization, my site is very fast atm ) and making my site even faster ( To challenge myself, and become a better coder ).
There is also a cosmetic issue, I personal think that a URL longer then the address bar looks bad.
You have some conflicting requirements as you want to shorten/compress the url without making it less descriptive. By the very nature of shortening the URL, you will, to a certain extent, make it less descriptive.
As I understand it, your goal is to optimise by sending less over the request. You mention 100+ characters, instead of 1000+ which I assume means they don't get that big? In which case, I'd see this as an unnecessary micro-optimisation.
To add to previous suggestions of using POST, a simple thing would be to just shorten the keys instead of using full names if you don't want to do full url shortening e.g.:
mysite.com/Reports/Ability.aspx?pid=7737&GID=132&AID=1140&EID=1609&EnID=-1&SID=17&IsP=True
These are obviously less descriptive.
But like I said, are you having a real problem with having long URLs?
I'm not sure I understand what's your problem with long URLs? Generally I'd try to avoid them, but if that's necessary then you won't depend on the user remembering it anyway, so why go through all the compressing trouble? Even with a URL of 1000 chars (~2KB) the page request won't be slow.
I would, however, consider using POST instead of GET if possible, to prettify the URL, but that's of course depends on your implementation / environment.
It is recommended a few times here to use POST instead of GET. I would strongly recommend AGAINST picking your HTTP action by what the URL looks like. There is more to this choice than how it is displayed in the browser.
A quick overview:
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html#checklist
A few options to add to the other answers:
Using a subclassed LinkButton for your navigation. This holds the extra data (PlayerId for example) inside its viewstate as properties. This won't be much help though if you're giving URLs to people via emails.
Use the MVC routing engine to produce slightly improved URLs - no keys for the querystring. e.g. mysite.com/Reports/Ability/7737/132/1140/1609/-1/17/True
Create your own URL shortener like tinyurl.com. Store the url in the database along with each of the querystring values to lookup.
Simply setup some friendly URLs for the most popular reports, for example mysite.com/Reports/JanuaryReport. You can also do this using the MVC routing engine.
The MVC routing engine is stand alone and can work without your site being an MVC site.
With my scheme, one could encode the params section of a URL as a base64 string which is ~50% shorter than a direct base64 representation. So for your case you get:
~50% shorter params section
a base 64 string which hides a lot of the detail
see http://blog.alivate.com.au/packed-url/
Most browsers can handle up 2048 characters in URL; if you don't feel like to use a long parameter list, you can always to pass parameters through POST requests.
There are theoretical problems with extended URLs. The exact limit varies across browser (roughly 2k in sort versions of IE) and server (4-8k in Apache, varying on version and configuration), and isn't officially specified in any RFC that I am aware of.
I would agree with synhershko, and replace the URL with form POST parameters instead if you are concerned that your URLs are growing too long.
I've encountered similar situations in the past, although my reasons for optimisation were for SEO. To me it depends on what you're doing with the page URL variables, are they being appended on all/most pages? If they are then to me there is almost always a much better way, although if you're far down the development path it's probably too late now.
I like being able to 'read' a URL, especially when I drop into an unknown site 2 or more layers deep in the navigation and there site is designed poorly, it's often the easiest and fastest way for an advanced user to find where they are on the site.
If you're interested in it from an SEO point of view, its normally best to have a hierarchy which only contains: / - _
Search engines will try and read URL's, see this video by Matt Cutts (can't remember how far into the video he mentions it but it's a good watch anyway...)
Any form of compression of the URL (hashing, compressing, non-descriptive) is going to:
make the urls harder to read, remember and type in correctly
have a performance impact as you will have to decrypt/decompress/convert the url before you can work with it.
Also, hashing is usually considered to be non-reversible - given a hashed value you shouldn't be able to work out what generated it, but you could use it to look up a value in a database, which gets you back to your first issue of short-long lookups.
You could easily just remove the redundant "ID" at the end of each parameter, and possibly strip out vowels or similar to "shorten" the url without losing too much from the semantics of the request.
But to be honest, the length of your URL is one of the least things to worry about in terms of performance - look at the size of any cookies you're sending back and forth between the browser and the server, and the page size you're sending back.