Stackoverflow Like URLS with Struts2 or JSP

Question

I have noticed that SO generates its url very nicely, let's say when creating a question, the url is like this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/ask or when viewing a question http://stackoverflow.com/questions/QUESTIONNUM/some-question-title

How does Stackoverflow implements such elegant urls, it does not have any query strings in its url, even though without query strings it can still identify what page, or what question number is being accessed. I want to implement such url in my application.

My question how do you implement this in an application? I am using Apache Tomcat and Struts2.

Possible duplicates: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5439655/struts2-seo-friendly-url, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12073951/how-to-change-url-pattern-in-struts-action/12076249 — Pigueiras, Dec 23 '12 at 14:05
possible duplicate of [How to do dynamic URL Rewriting in J2EE](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1704323/how-to-do-dynamic-url-rewriting-in-j2ee) — KV Prajapati, Dec 24 '12 at 03:22

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

2

StackOverflow is built with ASP.NET MVC. It uses ASP.NET routing. The important part of this url is QUESTIONNUM. That's what's used to query the database and retrieve the question number. The question title is completely arbitrary. For example both those urls point to exactly the same location:

So basically when a link to a given question is generated, the question id is used to retrieve the question details from the database (such as the title of the question) and the proper url is built using HTML helpers in ASP.NET MVC. Since the title of the question could contain arbitrary characters, this title is filtered through a regular expression to remove dangerous characters and replace them with their safe equivalents.

edited May 23 '17 at 10:24

Community

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answered Dec 23 '12 at 13:25

Darin Dimitrov

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What methodology is this called? url rerouting? I really can't make research about this since I feel like this a shot in the dark. – user962206 Dec 23 '12 at 13:29
Is this achievable with java? just routing? – user962206 Dec 23 '12 at 13:30
Of course that it's possible. You could use url rewriting: http://edwin.baculsoft.com/2011/12/creating-a-pretty-url-with-struts-framework-and-urlrewrite/ – Darin Dimitrov Dec 23 '12 at 13:33
@user962206 Use servlets/filters and define your own *url-patterns*. – KV Prajapati Dec 24 '12 at 03:21

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 28 '12 at 07:24

You can always write your own ActionMapper and used instead of default mapper as follow:

<bean type="org.apache.struts2.dispatcher.mapper.ActionMapper" name="myMapper" class="com.company.MyActionMapper" />
<constant name="struts.mapper.class" value="myMapper" />

Stackoverflow Like URLS with Struts2 or JSP

2 Answers2