How do I get rid of the ? (question mark) in the URL that identifies the start of the query string? - coldfusion

Question

I am using ColdFusion 9.1.2.
I set up a new web site that parses the query string after the domain name and slash. What is left is the MusicianID and then a string used to help with SEO. The URL looks like this:
http://awesomealbums.info/?1085/jim-croce
http://awesomealbums.info/?1077/james-taylor
When I share it using Facebook, Facebook removes the question mark and encodes it. They can't seem to parse it so they display it as the home page.
These throw an error that I can't control:
http://awesomealbums.info/1085/jim-croce
http://awesomealbums.info/1077/james-taylor
I notice that StackOverlfow and other sites are able to exclude the question mark that starts a query string. I would like to do the same. I, however, can't change any IIS or CF Administrator settings. I need to code the solution. I've tried, but I get IIS telling me they can't find the page.
I want my URLs to look like this:
http://awesomealbums.info/1085/jim-croce // same as above but no ?
http://awesomealbums.info/1077/james-taylor // same as above but no ?
Here's the code that I am using right now to parse the URL and get the MusicianID.
<cfscript>
QString = CGI.QUERY_STRING;
if (QString eq "") {
include "Home.cfm";
} else if (QString eq "WhoAmI") {
include "WhoAmI.cfm";
} else {
IndexOfSlash = Find("/", QString);
if (IndexOfSlash eq 5) {
ThisID = left(QString, 4);
if (isNumeric(ThisID)) {
MusicianID = ThisID;
include "Musician.cfm";
}
} else {
location(url="http://www.awesomealbums.info" addtoken="false");
}
}
How can I alter my site so that the question mark can be removed and the web server doesn't get funky and I can parse out the query string?

Answer 1

The keyword you are looking for is URL rewriting. It has to happen on the web server, since you want to handle all requests in the top-level directory. If your web server is the Apache httpd, you can do it like this:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/(\d{4})/([\w-]+)$ /?$1/$2 [L]
or
RewriteRule ^/(\d{4})/([\w-]+)$ /Musician.cfm?MusicianID=$1 [L]

Answer 2

Since you can't modify the web server (as Roland correctly suggests) there is one alternative - use URLs that look like this:
http://awesomealbums.info/index.cfm/1085/jim-croce
Structured this way, the webserver (IIS) will still pass control to your script. Then you can start having CF take over control of the processing. Your CGI.query_string will be empty, but your cgi.path_info variable will contain /1085/jim-croce. You can then start parsing that and handling it as needed.

Answer 3

The answer for IIS is basically the same as Roland mentions in his answer. You need to use URL Rewriting, that is the only way to accomplish what you are looking to do. This is because technically the URL that you want to request, does not exist as a real page or resource on the server, and you need to use URL Rewriting to intercept the page request, map it using regular expressions, then pass it to your application as the query string (page parameters) that you are expecting. So, if you are doing this on a hosted server, contact your host and see if they have something setup or installed on the server for doing URL Rewriting. Most any decent host certainly will.
If you are using IIS7, then info on using the built in URL Rewriting can be found at the link:
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/
If you are using an older version of IIS, then you need to install an application on the server that will do this as previous versions of IIS do not have built in support for regular expression based rewriting that you would need to properly map your URLs to the correct parameters on your query string. For older versions of IIS, I've used Helicon IsapiRewrite which you can find at:
http://www.isapirewrite.com/

Answer 4

riding off of jfeasel's answer, you can use ColdCourse:
http://coldcourse.riaforge.org/