Proper way to fix this rewrite rule? - regex

Question

We have an application that is run in a virtual folder in IIS. We don't want the virtual folder name to be part our links though (primarily to preserve original link names for SEO reasons).
So here is one example of a rewrite rule we're using:
<rule name="Rewrite Account controller to UI">
<match url="/Account(.*)"/>
<action type="Rewrite" url="ui/Account{R:1}"/>
<conditions>
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.axd$" negate="true" ignoreCase="true"/>
</conditions>
</rule>
The problem with this rule is that it would also match "~/someothercontroller/258642/Accounting-Essentials" and turn it into "/ui/Accounting-Essentials". And I don't want to include the host because the host is different in each environment.
What would this need to look like to match only if the expression is the first thing after the host?
Edit:
Sorry, I guess my post wasn't as clear as I thought it was. An example would be http://x/Account. This should rewrite to http://x/ui/Account. The x could be any host name with any number of periods but it's only the host name so it wouldn't contain any slashes.
You can see in the rule I have above that I want it to include anything that comes after Account however I realize that's not quite right either because it shouldn't match "http://x/Accounting", but it should match "http://x/Account/whatever".

Answer 1

So essentially, you want to make sure that Account comes right after the host, and also that Account is the full name of the directory. You can achieve this like so:
<rule name="Rewrite Account controller to UI">
<match url="^Account(/.*)?"/>
<action type="Rewrite" url="ui/Account{R:1}"/>
<conditions>
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.axd$" negate="true" ignoreCase="true"/>
</conditions>
</rule>
The ^ ensures that this is the beginning of the string that you are evaluating.
The / after Account ensures that you only rewrite the url if "Account" is the full name of the directory.
It appears from the documentation that the inital / will not be included in the string you're evaluating (which is why I removed it), but you can test it both ways to be sure.
Also note that I added a / before {R:1}.
Edit: Another way
You could also add a rule that verifies that the whole URL matches a certain pattern. This might actually be an easier way:
<rule name="Rewrite Account controller to UI">
<match url="/Account(.*)"/>
<action type="Rewrite" url="ui/Account{R:1}"/>
<conditions>
<add input="{URL}" pattern="\.axd$" negate="true" ignoreCase="true"/>
<add input="{REQUEST_URI}" pattern="^/Account(/.*)?" ignoreCase="true"/>
</conditions>
</rule>
The Microsoft docs give this example of the server variable values:
For example, if a request was made for this URL:
http://www.example.com/content/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=3, and a rewrite rule was defined on the site level then:
The rule pattern gets the URL string content/default.aspx as an input.
The QUERY_STRING server variable contains tabid=2&subtabid=3.
The HTTP_HOST server variable contains www.example.com.
The SERVER_PORT server variable contains 80.
The SERVER_PORT_SECURE server variable contains 0 and HTTPS contains OFF.
The REQUEST_URI server variable contains /content/default.aspx?tabid=2&subtabid=3.
The PATH_INFO server variable contains /content/default.aspx.