URL Rewrite/Redirect not following its own rules

Question

I am trying to set up Redirects to various pages on a website. For example, I want something like this:

www.example.com/about -> https://www.example2.com/about-us.

This works fine. However, I also want something like this:

www.example.com/about/contact -> https://www.example2.com/contact/

I have created the rules, and the way I understand it is that the contact one needs to be written first. I have done that, but the contact rule instead redirects to https://www.example2.com/about-us/.

Here are the rules as I have written them:

<rule name="Contact Page Redirect" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^about/contact/" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false" />
<action type="Redirect" url="https://www.example2.com/contact/" appendQueryString="false" redirectType="Found" />
</rule>
<rule name="About Page Redirect" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^about" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="https://www.example2.com/about-us" appendQueryString="false" redirectType="Found" />
</rule>

I even tried adding <add input="{REQUEST_URI}" pattern="^about/contact" negate="true" /> inside of the conditions on the About Page Redirect rule.

What am I missing? No matter what I try the contact redirect never goes to the URL specified.

Answer 1

Hi @MEccle$ ,

Yes you are right, the order of configuration affects the order in which this function is matched.

Based on your description, I did some test and reproduced your issue on localhost. The mainly problem is the match rule regular expression <match url="^about/contact/" /> .

You need to pay attention to every symbol of it, and in your case you seem to be adding an extra / sign at the end. This will result in no match for www.example.com/about/contact, you must type the full address correctly: www.example.com/about/contact/ to match it.

Therefore, you need to modify this configuration to something like this:

   <rule name="Contact Page Redirect" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">  
      <match url="^about/contact" />  
        .............  
        .............  
   </rule>  

Best regards,
Xudong Peng

---

If the answer is the right solution, please click "Accept Answer" and kindly upvote. If you have extra questions about this answer, please click "Comment".
Note: Please follow the steps in our documentation to enable e-mail notifications if you want to receive the related email notification for this thread.

Answer 2

Hi @XuDong Peng-MSFT ,

Can special characters also be an issue?

I am doing something similar with another URL:

I am trying to take www.example.com/press-releases/really-long-title-here-with-a-number-in-parentheses-(1)/ and redirect to www.example2.com.

When I test the pattern in the URL Rewrite tool, I made sure it was identical, and still I get no matching pattern.

I ask because in relation to the first one, the underlying URL is about/#contact.

I am using the Rewrite tool, but here is what both look like in the rules now:

<rule name="Contact Page Redirect" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^about/#contact" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false" />
<action type="Redirect" url="https://www.example2.com/contact" appendQueryString="false" redirectType="Found" />
</rule>
<rule name="About Page Redirect" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^about" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false">
</conditions>
<action type="Redirect" url="https://www.exmaple2.com/about-us" appendQueryString="false" redirectType="Found" />
</rule>

What is happening now tiht his one is the COntact Page Redirect goes to www.example2.com/about-us/#contact instead of www.example2.com/contact

Likewise, here is the rule for the other failing Redirect I have with special characters:

<rule name="Press Release Stuff Redirect" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="^press-releases/really-long-title-here-with-a-number-in-parentheses-and-at-this-point-i-just-need-something-that-is-one-hundred-and-fifty-seven-characters-long-almost-theres-(1)/" ignoreCase="true" />
<conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false" />
<action type="Redirect" url="https://www.example2.com" redirectType="Found" />
</rule>

I have checked every other redirect that wasn't working, and now it is, because I can match the patterns. It is just these two that don't seem to want to match, even if I type them in correctly when testing the pattern.

Answer 3

Thank you. I'll redo the URLs to not have the special characters.