Forcing lowercase only works the first time

Question

So I am trying to force ALL HTTP requests to lowercase and i'm using this rule:
&nbsp;when HTTP_REQUEST { 
&nbsp;HTTP::path [string tolower [HTTP::path]] 
&nbsp;}&nbsp;
&nbsp;It works on the host and it works if I manually enter www.domain.com/Url.aspx but if I click through any links it allows the Mixed case again.&nbsp;
&nbsp;Whiskey tango foxtrot?!?

hooleylist · Answer

Hi John, 
&nbsp;  
&nbsp; The iRule is going to rewrite the path before the requests are sent to the pool members.  It won't affect the URLs in the response content sent to clients.  So when a client clicks on a link or follows a redirect, the address bar will show whatever case the application used in its references to itself.  The requested path seen by the web application will always be in lower case. 
&nbsp;  
&nbsp; It would be quite resource intensive to try to parse and rewrite every path from response payloads (and to a lesser extent, the response headers).  If you really wanted to do this, you would need to figure out a regular expression which would match the paths.  You could then use a stream filter and STREAM::expression based iRule to do this. 
&nbsp;  
&nbsp; Aaron

hamish · Answer

Apart from asthetics, is this going to matter though? Domain names are case insensitive, so the request will always come back to the correct VS... When the request does come in, he iRUle will fire and you'll rewrite the URI to lowercase before the request is passed through to your backend server. 
&nbsp;  
&nbsp; I've got to ask though... Why is this necessary?  (Sorry, curiosity only) 
&nbsp;  
&nbsp; H

michael_yates · Answer

The first part of a URL is universally case insensitive [HTTP::host], but the URI [HTTP::uri]can be case sensitive depending on the operating system hosting the website. 
&nbsp;  
&nbsp; Windows (IIS) - links will get to your pages regardless of capitalization (or lack of it). 
&nbsp;  
&nbsp; Linux/Unix - if your site is hosted in a Linux/Unix environment and you rename your page www.example.com/PopularPage.htm to www.example.com/popularpage.htm, you could suddenly find yourself facing a drop in traffic as people clicking on the search engine link get a 404 error telling them that the page cannot be found. &nbsp;

johndegern_4568 · Answer

The company I am doing this for hired a SEO consultant to give them recommendations. This is one of those recommendations. In the infinite wisdom of the developers they coded files using mixed case throughout the entire site. This is giving duplicate pages in the Page Ranks of multiple crawlers.

johndegern_4568 · Answer

Oh yeah...we are using IIS...

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Forcing lowercase only works the first time

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