404 Smart Redirect

marty

Hello. The search seems to be down, so I apologize if this question has come up before but:

I am trying to make a "smart" custom 404 Error Document. I run a MySql driven website that contains "Profiles" of many users. I would like to arrange it so that if i tried to go to the URL: http://domain.whatever/marty -- even though the file "/marty" doesn't exist, it should redirect to the appropriate space for "marty" on the site.

At this point, when i go to http://domain.whatever/marty, I get redirected to my custom 404 ErrorDocument (a php script), but have no way of knowing what URL the user initially tried to access.

In essence what I need is to be able to pass the value of the invalid request_uri to the ErrorDocument php script.

Any ideas?

billzeller

Hi,

If you put a call to phpinfo() into the custom ErrorDocument, you should be able to see which error docs are available to you. I don't have PHP installed as a module (virtual server sigh) and as such don't have access to those variables.

As a side note, I remember reading somewhere (php manual comments?) that the ErrorDocument had to be bigger than c. 512 bytes to be acknowledged
by Internet Explorer.

Best Regards,
Bill Zeller

marty

thanks for the feedback bill. I actually solved this problem by taking a look at the Apache manual. So in case you, or anyone else is interested, here's how it works:

first i set up an ErrorDocument directive in my virtual server configuration (in httpd.conf) that looks like this:

ErrorDocument 404 /myScript.php

(that's a path to myScript.php from the v-server document root).

then in myScript, I used $REQUEST_URI to determine which URL the user tried to access. I compare that against a list of user names. If there is a match, I redirect to the appropriate user profile... if not, I send them back to "/".

this was the best alternative I could think of to avoid creating a directory off root for each user.

cheers
marty