Assistance Please on Rewrite

cenocre

I need to change part of a URL from:
This:
http://DOMAIN/[b]cgi.pan[/b]~MORE_PARAMETERS
needs to become:
http://DOMAIN/cgi-bin/[b]Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch[/b]~MORE_PARAMETERS
therefore this:
cgi.pan
gets changed to:
cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch
Is this what I should do?
"cgi.pan" in "Virtual Path Regular Expression"
with no conditions
internal redirection
"cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~" in Redirect To
append query string checked
Should anything else be checked?

anybody

Do you have any experience with mod_rewrite and apache? If you do then I suggest writing your rewrites in a htaccess file and using TRUSTAbyss' AWS:MRT to translate it to abyss. It saves me allot of time and it works rather well.

pkSML

cenocre wrote
I need to change part of a URL from:
This:
http://DOMAIN/[b]cgi.pan[/b]~MORE_PARAMETERS
needs to become:
http://DOMAIN/cgi-bin/[b]Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch[/b]~MORE_PARAMETERS
therefore this:
cgi.pan
gets changed to:
cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch
Is this what I should do?
"cgi.pan" in "Virtual Path Regular Expression"
with no conditions
internal redirection
"cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~" in Redirect To
append query string checked
Should anything else be checked?

Virtual path: ^/cgi.pan$
internal redirection to:
/cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch
append query string
That would be my guess!

cenocre

Thanks to both of you. I tried the script with a simple test to no avail.
I decided to try a very simple string with no unusual characters and convert:
http://domain.com/this/index.html
to
http://domain.com/that/index.html
Virtual path: ^/this$
internal redirection to:
/that
append query string (also tried unchecked)
It didn't work. I've tried various combinations of checkboxes and nada - there is no change to the URL at all. Sigh - this should be a no brainer.
Any ideas?

cenocre

I tried a variation:
Virtual path: /this
internal redirection to:
/that
append query string
The URL briefly flashed with "//////////" after the .html and then stayed as it originally was with "too many redirects".
So, I tried:
Virtual path: /this/
internal redirection to:
/that/
append query string
and got an error 500
then:
Virtual path: this
internal redirection to:
that
append query string
and got an "too many redirects"

pkSML

cenocre wrote
Thanks to both of you. I tried the script with a simple test to no avail.
I decided to try a very simple string with no unusual characters and convert:
http://domain.com/this/index.html
to
http://domain.com/that/index.html
Virtual path: ^/this$
internal redirection to:
/that
append query string (also tried unchecked)
It didn't work. I've tried various combinations of checkboxes and nada - there is no change to the URL at all. Sigh - this should be a no brainer.
Any ideas?

Ah, yes, this one should be easy to solve. Don't you hate banging your head over something so simple? I seem to do that quite frequently when coding.
First of all, the query string is everything after the ? in a URL. It's not telling Abyss which script to run, but rather variables that help configure the script.
Secondly, understanding regular expressions is the ultimate bane of all newbie scripters. I've spent much time at http://regular-expressions.info. It's very helpful.
So, here's the solution for your simple query:
http://domain.com/this/index.html --> http://domain.com/that/index.html
Virtual path: ^/this/(.*)$
internal redirection to: /that/$1
append query string
Everything matched between the two parenthesis is held in the $1 variable.
PS If you could give me more example URLs that you want converted for Panorama, I'm sure I or someone else could get you rolling.

cenocre

Your this/that example worked. Thank you.
I hate this kind of time waster. I've been programming professionally for about 20 years and even did some stuff in CP/M86 and have found this to be the most frustrating. Some supposedly simple mod_rewrite stuff took months of probing to get a decent answer.
As for Panorama, this is the only change that we need to do and is the same for all sites:
cgi.pan

gets changed to:
cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch~
cgi.pan example - look at the URL after doing a search at: http://www.naturephotocentral.com/Open_Vocabulary.html
Panorama.cgi example - look at the URL after doing a search at: http://www.rogerwadestudio.com/Open_Vocabulary.html
Thanks again.

pkSML

cenocre wrote
cgi.pan

gets changed to:
cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch~

From the example sites you gave, you should know that this rewriting is quite an advanced (and weird!) system. It will probably take a lot of tweaking to get it working just right.
Try this:
virtual path regex: ^/cgi.pan(.*)
case-sensitive: unchecked
conditions: (none)
apply to subrequests: checked
internal redirection to: /cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch~$1
append query string: checked
escape redirection location: checked
next action: continue with next rule
Also, when you see the table of URL rewrite rules, click 'edit', right next to 'advanced parameters'. Start a log file and check 'log variables'.
If you run into trouble, check out your url rewrite logfile -- it will show you exactly what the parsing engine was doing. Be sure to keep an eye on the size of this file as it can grow very quickly!
If you need more help, include at least one example from the url rewrite file. You can post it on the code-bin if you want to. (That's one of my Abyss-hosted websites!)

cenocre

I had already figured it out and tried your last idea. It almost works, but changes the $ just AFTER the changing string to &.
Here is the log output. The ampersand in front of "bjphoto" started out as a dollar sign and should NOT have been changed. That appears to be the only issue.

Rule #1: Regex [^/cgi.pan(.*)$] matches with the request URI
Matching results:
$0=/cgi.pan
$1=
Replacing the virtual path with [/cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi] => /cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi
Adding the query string replacement [?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch~$1] => /cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch~
Appending the original query string => /cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch~&bjphoto
===> Internal redirection to /cgi-bin/Panorama.cgi?PanoramaCGI~.cgiDispatch~&bjphoto