Virtual URL

Anon

I'm trying to implement "virtual URLs" using PHP. When I say virtual URL I mean I want to make certain URLS of the form below:

http://www.someserver.com/ArtistName1
http://www.someserver.com/ArtistName2
.
.
.

All will execute the same logic, only dependent on the path-info (ArtistName1, ArtistName2...), so I can pass on execution to a generic script eg. ArtistName.php3 which accesses a mysql database using artistname as a key, and pulling and displaying url specific info.

I'm aware there's a way to do it using mod_perl with internal redirects, but I don't really want to compile mod_perl into my apache processes (will make them bulky), and I'd prefer not to have ArtistName1.php3, ArtistName2.php3 etc. files on disk either linked to, or doing a redirect to ArtistName.php3.

Is there an elegant, easy way to do this using php/mod_php?

Oh, I'm lazy so I don't really want to modify my httpd.conf every time I need to add/modify/delete a virtual url.

Thought about using a "404" PHP script, but it involves a http redirect (slow) if the url is found in the database I describe above.

Anon

What you can do is this:

http://domain/whatever.php/artist1

and whatever.php will be executed, and can get /artist1 from the environment. That's the easiest way (but it does look a tad ugly).

mod_rewrite does what you want on apache.

Dave

Anon

Dave, thanks for reply.

I'm hard headed, and I want the artist name to be at the top of the path info. I know this sounds stupid, but it's more attractive for the artists that way.

mod_rewrite won't work because there's no pattern to the url. It could be any name.

Anon

Is the problem that you don't want to actually create the subdirectories for each of the artists?

If you created the subdirectories you could put an "index.html" in them that sets up the artist specific variables and then include()'s the script that will actually retrieve and display the artist information:

=======================
<?
// index.html

$artist = 'Artist1';

include("$commonincpath/artistinfo.inc");

?>

-- Rich Rijnders
-- Irvine, CA US

Anon

Correct. I do not want to setup directories, or php files, or links to the generic php script that handles the request.

I currently use symbolic links from the actual URL to the generic handler, but it's a mess. I've got over 600 links. If I used directories, I'd have over 600 directories.

Seems like I can can only avoid this mess by using mod_perl or a redirect from a custom PHP 404 error handler script. The last option is undesireable to me because of the redirect.

Anon

If you are using Apache, you could set up srm.conf with aliases for each of the URL's and point them to the same script.

Alias /Artist001/ /usr/local/etc/httpd/

Then the default script in the target directory can do the work of extracting the entered path information and retrieving the artist information based on that.

The only caveat is I don't know if there is a limit on how many aliases can be defined within the srm.conf...

HTH

-- Rich Rijnders
-- Irvine, CA US

Anon

I know about this, but I would still have to maintain the srm.conf file, and do an apache restart with every mod/add/del. Could write a perl script to do this I guess.

I think this is my best alternative besides using mod_perl to do an internal redirect.

I was was just wondering if there was a way to do it with pure php.

Thanks.

Anon

The only way I know of to do this with pure php would be to go the 401 error intercept route.

I can, however; offer a solution to your srm.conf and apache restart problems. There is another directive you could use called "AliasMatch". It allows you to set up a regular expression type match of the incoming url and redirect to a specific script. If the url's your setting up fit a consistant patern, you could set up a directive like:

AliasMatch /Artist(.*) /artistinfo.php?artist=$1

This should redirect all your artist specific urls to your artistinfo.php script and even pass the artist identifying part of the url into the script as a variable you can work with (play with the ".*" part to get the info you need into the var).

This would keep you from having to maintain the srm.conf file, thus eliminating the need for the apache restarts, as well.

HTH

-- Rich Rijnders
-- Irvine, CA US