ASP.NET 2.0 - URL Mapping

ASP.NET 2.0 provides features supporting "vanity url's" or "friendly url's". These are useful when you want to distribute simple url's to customers.

Say for instance you have an online store, offering a new product to a segment of customers. The path to the catalog item is

http://AcmeCorp.com/store/catalog.aspx?productid=TY3466a&customerid=143044&branch=south

But you'd like to distribute a simpler url:

http://AcmeCorp.com/store/MultiVitamins.aspx

URL Mapping makes this possible. The following is a much simpler example. Note that it just happens to use the location appSettings overrides described in an earlier blog.
The highlighted section specifies the url mapping. The vanity url's (Diablo_Config.aspx and Diablo_Config.aspx?loc=test) are actually just as complicated as the actual paths (testconfig.aspx and test/testconfig.aspx), but it illustrates what's possible. The following screenshots illustrate what the "customer" sees:


The aspx page that outputs the appSettings is simply copied to the application root and /Test folder for illustrative purposes. If you're interested in aspx (not code-behind) that references app settings, see the following link.