Redoing the DotNetNuke Friendly Url Provider for Human Reading and Search Engines Indexing

NOTE: Due to popular demand, there is now a Support Forum for support requests on this module, or if you just want the thing to work ASAP, I can provide one-on-one support or install it for you.

What I did previously was improve upon Scott McCulloch's work by working out a way to handle parameters. All well and good, and it worked OK. But it just still didn't look quite right. What's more, I wanted to use the rel="tag" microformat on my tagging module, and I was stuck with the .aspx extension on everything, which the microformat doesn't recognise.

So after some back and forwards on the Ventrian forum where I posted my update, I went away and had a good think about it. There were two things nagging at me:

• 1. The performance would drop off drastically with the number of pages in a site, due to the iterative search for a match.
• 2. The only way to get truly nice Url's is to ditch the page extension of .aspx. When you think about it, it doesn't serve the user at all. It's really only there to make it easier on the web server. It had to go

Doing number 1 was easy : just do a dictionary based lookup on the page path, if it's found, great. If not, 404 coming right up.

It works like this (if you're not intimately familiar with DNN, you might want to skip to the next part). On the first request, a dictionary of path information is built up. This contains the path (example: mysite/mypage) and the actual DNN request Url (example: default.aspx?tabid=37). The dictionary is stashed away in the Cache.
So far so good. The incoming url is deconstructed into segments. Working backwards from the full url (mysite/mypage/mypath/myvalue) the url is tried against the dictionary for a 'hit'. If a page entry in the dictionary is found, great, the url is rewritten and processing continues.
If the dictionary didn't contain the page, then the next segment is removed, thus mysite/mypage/mypath/myvalue is trimmed to mysite/mypage/mypath. This trimming process is repeated until there are not segments left. If nothing was found after all that, the page dictionary is rebuilt one more time, just in case it's a new page, then the process is repeat