How do you see the client-side URL in ColdFusion? - url

Let's say, on a ColdFusion site, that the user has navigated to
http://www.example.com/sub1/
The server-side code typically used to tell you what URL the user is at, looks like:
http://#cgi.server_name##cgi.script_name#?#cgi.query_string#
however, "cgi.script_name" automatically includes the default cfm file for that folder- eg, that code, when parsed and expanded, is going to show us "http://www.example.com/sub1/index.cfm"
So, whether the user is visiting sub1/index.cfm or sub1/, the "cgi.script_name" var is going to include that "index.cfm".
The question is, how does one figure out which URL the user actually visited? This question is mostly for SEO-purposes- It's often preferable to 301 redirect "/index.cfm" to "/" to make sure there's only one URL for any piece of content- Since this is mostly for the benefit of spiders, javascript isn't an appropriate solution in this case. Also, assume one does not have access to isapi_rewrite or mod_rewrite- The question is how to achieve this within ColdFusion, specifically.

I suppose this won't be possible.
If the client requests "GET /", it will be translated by the web server to "GET /{whatever-default-file-exists-fist}" before ColdFusion even gets invoked. (This is necessary for the web server to know that ColdFusion has to be invoked in the first place!)
From ColdFusion's (or any application server's) perspective, the client requested "GET /index.cfm", and that's what you see in #CGI#.
As you've pointed out yourself, it would be possible to make a distinction by using a URL-rewriting tool. Since you specifically excluded that path, I can only say that you're out of luck here.

Not sure that it is possible using CF only, but you can make the trick using webserver's URL rewriting -- if you're using them, of course.
For Apache it can look this way. Say, we're using following mod_rewrite rule:
RewriteRule ^page/([0-9]+)/?$
index.cfm?page=$1&noindex=yes [L]
Now when we're trying to access URL http://website.com/page/10/ CGI shows:
QUERY_STRING page=10&noindex=yes
See the idea? Think same thing is possible when using IIS.
Hope this helps.

I do not think this is possible in CF. From my understanding, the webserver (Apache, IIS, etc) determines what default page to show, and requests it from CF. Therefore, CF does not know what the actual called page is.
Sergii is right that you could use URL rewrting to do this. If that is not available to you, you could use the fact that a specific page is given precedence in the list of default pages.
Let's assume that default.htm is the first page in the list of default pages. Write a generic default.htm that automatically forwards to index.cfm (or whatever). If you can adjust the list of defaults, you can have CF do a 301 redirect. If not, you can do a meta-refresh, or JS redirect, or somesuch in an HTML file.

I think this is possible.
Using GetHttpRequestData you will have access to all the HTTP headers.
Then the GET header in that should tell you what file the browser is requesting.
Try
<cfdump var="#GetHttpRequestData()#">
to see exactly what you have available to use.
Note - I don't have Coldfusion to hand to verify this.
Edit: Having done some more research it appears that GetHttpRequestData doesn't include the GET header. So this method probably won't work.
I am sure there is a way however - try dumping the CGI scope and see what you have.

If you are able to install ISAPI_rewrite (Assuming you're on IIS) - http://www.helicontech.com/isapi_rewrite/
It will insert a variable x-rewrite-url into the GetHttpRequestData() result structure which will either have / or /index.cfm depending on which URL was visited.
Martin

Related

Control Public File Response Code in Rails

Let's say that I have a POST endpoint in my Rails app, in which it gets a param called state, which will be an integer of either 200 or 503.
How can I make the Robots.txt file respond with the given state from that POST endpoint, I mean I need a way to control the response code of that only file (Robots.txt) depending on that POST endpoint.
BTW, question is not about how to store that state or something, it's only about how to change the response code of a public file?
Is that possible?
What I have in mind for this and trying now is to have a controller action matching the robots.txt route, but I feel this is so silly to do.
Yes, if you want Rails to be involved in deciding the response for a given URL, then you're going to want to define a controller action to handle those requests.
You can use send_file to actually do the file-sending part.
Depending on your web server's configuration, it's likely you'll need the actual robots.txt file to be stored somewhere other than public/ -- otherwise it might get served without Rails even having a chance to get involved.
You could instead arrange to rewrite your nginx (say) configuration file at runtime, based on what response code you want... but I think that would be silly to do.
A more practical middle-ground would be to have Rails create or delete a marker file, and then use a conditional in the nginx configuration based on whether that file exists. That would be an nginx question though... and would get complicated if you have more than one server.

check if url can be loaded in an iframe

Snip.ly nicely checks if the entered web address can be used in an iframe.
I'd like to replicate it in ruby. Looking through their code they send an ajax request to their server and thats where they do the validation.
Even after extensive googling couldn't find anything that could help me accomplish that.
My use case is that we let users add news listings to their page, which are shown in iframes, and would like to show it if the entered url can be used in an iframe.
You can figure out some cases by checking the X-Frame-Options header. But as you mentioned in the comments, it does not work all the time.
In my experience, it's best to side-step the problem altogether.
If you reverse-proxy your request through your rails server, then you can display pretty much anything all the time in your iframe.
Following is an example of the process. I'm assuming that your server is your-server.com and the user wants to list a page on user.com/list. The way it works would be:
Set an iframe's src to https://your-server.com/proxy?url=https://user.com/list`
Intercept the request, extract the url: https://user.com/list
Perform an HTTP request on https://user.com/list to fetch the content
Return it to the browser as if it come from your own server
This approach works pretty much all the time, but it then has other limitations:
- you should reverse proxy any asset on that page that has a relative url; otherwise the css/images may be broken
- you must handle ajax requests on that page
You can fix these as well, by transforming the html before step 4.
You could use https://github.com/waterlink/rack-reverse-proxy for step 2 and 3, instead of re-implementing your own reverse proxy.
You could set it up using the following code in config/application.rb:
config.middleware.insert(0, Rack::ReverseProxy) do
reverse_proxy_options timeout: 10 # avoids waiting for pages that take forever to load
reverse_proxy(/proxy\?url=(.*)/, '$1') # reverse proxy on the url parameter
end

Are friendly URLs based on directories?

I've been reading many articles about SEO and investigating how to improve my site. I found an article that said that having friendly URLs help online indexers to find and positionate your site better than using URLs with lots of GET parameters so I decided to adapt my site to this kind of URL. I've also read that there's a way (editing .htaccess) but it's not the best way and it doesn't look really good.
For example, that's how Google's About URL looks like:
https://www.google.com/search/about/es/
When surfing into FTP do they see the directories search/about/es/index.html? If so, you must create many files and directories for each language instead of using &l=es, is it that worth?
You can never know (for sure) how resources are mapped to URLs.
For example, the URL https://www.google.com/search/about/es/ could
point to the HTML file /search/about/es/index.html
point to the HTML file /foo/bar/1.html
point to the PHP script /index.php
point to the PHP script /search.php?title=about&lang=es
point to the document available from the URL https://internal.google.com/1238
…
It’s always the server that, given the URL from the request, decides which resource to deliver. Unless you have access to the server, you can’t know how. (Even if a URL ends with .php, it’s not necessarily the case that PHP is involved at all.)
The server could look for a file that physically exists (if URL rewriting is involved: even in "other" places than what the URL path suggests), the server could run a script that generates a document on the fly (e.g., taking the content from your database), the server could output the file available from another URL, etc.
Related Wikipedia articles:
Rewrite engine
Web framework: URL mapping
Front controller

how to add subdomain name from current url using .htacces rules

I have a URL link like,
http://domain.com/abs/def/city and,
i want to display it as http://city.domain.com/ABC/def
using .htaccess.
Can any one help me by providing .ht access rules.
I want to write .htaccess rules for each city name in URL act as sub domain name.
Also i want it to be dynamic as there are different cities are available in site.
i am using below code in .htaccess file, but not working properly.
RewriteRule ^index.php/(.)/(.)/([^/]+)$ http://$3.domain/$1/$2/$3 [R=301,L]
is there any way to get my requirement using or by modifying my above code or by some other .htaccess code.
Sorry, but what you ask is not possible. This is a typical missunderstanding about url rewriting:
Url rewriting rewrites (manipulates) incoming requests on the server side before processing them. It is not possible to alter outgoing content such that contained urls are changed by this means.
There are solutions for that though:
apaches proxy module can "map" one url into the scope of some other url
there are also modules for automatic post processing of generated html markup
more exotic or creative solutions exist, it depends on your situation in the end...
But usually the easiest is to change the application (typically just its central configuration) such that it contains final urls (pointing to the subdomain in your case). Then you can indeed use the rewriting module to "re-map" those to the previous scope when future incoming requests refer to them (they got clicked).
Ok, second step getting additional info from your comments:
Just to get this clear: you understand that it is not possible to change the link you send out by means of rewriting, but you want to change the url shown in the browser after the user has clicked on some city link? That is something different to what you wrote before, that actually is possible. Great.
If the rewriting works as you want it to (you see the desired url in the browsers address bar), then we can go on. The error message indicates a name resolution problem, that has nothing to do with rewriting. Most likely the domain "cambridge.192.168.2.107" cannot be resolved, which is actually not surprising. You cannot mix ip addresses and names, it is either or.
Also I see that you are using internal, non-routable addresses. So you also are responsible for the name resolution yourself, since no public DNS server can guess what you are setting up internally. Did you do that?
I suggest these steps:
stop using an ip addres for this, use a domain name.
since you are working internally, take care that that domain name is actually resolved to your local systems ip address. How you do this depends on your setup and system, obviously. Most likely you need some entry in the file /etc/hosts or similar.
you need to take care that also those "subdomain names" get resolved to the same address. This is not trivial, again it depends on the setting and system you locally use.
if that name resolution works, then you should see a request in your http servers access log file. Then and only then it makes sense to go on...

Multiple calls to TWebModule.SendDirect

I have created a Web application which runs on Apache using TWebModule. I have gotten a little "liberal" with the use of SendRedirect. In one case I found I was calling SendRedirect and following it up with another SendRedirect call - all in the same method handler. On my Test box, it would always redirect to the url of the first SendRedirect. But on my production box, I discovered (much to my chagrin) that it was redirecting the browser to the url of the 2nd redirect.
I know the "Real" answer is that I should not be calling multiple SendRedirects. But aside from that, does anyone have an explanation why in one environment it goes to the first SendRedirect while on another it goes to the 2nd?
Check Location: header you get. You probably have different rewrite rules, or some other appache configuration options set.

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