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Brett_Hanson_95's avatar
Brett_Hanson_95
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Jul 27, 2016

Redirecting URL with #

Hoping someone can help with a redirect on a URL entered into the browser that contains a

I've seen a few posts talking about this and the general consensus is that the is NOT sent to the server/F5. I can see this is the case when reviewing logs and intercepting traffic. My main issue here is that I'm seeing the inclusion of the "" in the URL is altering which page is actually delivered - rather than taking someone to a anchor/segment within the page that lives at the URL pre-.

NOTE: We have Glassfish in the back end.

We need to redirect...

FROM: 

...//fqdn/myaccount//forms/moving
TO: 
...//fqdn/moving

To demonstrate, with NO redirects in place at all, we see the following behaviour when attempting to navigate to variations of the URL:

FAILS (returns Glassfish 404 error):

...//fqdn/myaccount/forms/moving

SUCCESS (goes to the myaccount page as expected) 

...//fqdn/myaccount/

SUCCESS (goes to a page about moving - the old page we want to redirect away from):

...//fqdn/myaccount//forms/moving

Problem is that nothing after the goes through in the request and the path is actually /myaccount As we don't want to redirect /myaccount - does anyone know how to make this happen?

Cheers, Brett

BIG-IP
devops
LTM

2 Replies

  • JG's avatar
    JG
    Icon for Cumulonimbus rankCumulonimbus
    Jul 27, 2016

    "" is a reserved character denoting a "fragment identifier component", the processing of which is a client-side operation. See rfc3986.

    In the case you have described, 

    ...//fqdn/myaccount//forms/moving

    works when the primary resource, i.e. the default index page in the directory "/myaccount", which can be "index.html" depending on the configuration of your Web server, is available, which accounts for the two success situations you have described above.

    ...//fqdn/myaccount/forms/moving

    fails because there is no primary content page in the directory "/myaccount/forms/moving" on your Web server.

    Based on the information you have provided, a redirect from:

    ...//fqdn/myaccount//forms/moving

    to: 

    ...//fqdn/moving

    can be achieved by setting up an HTTP header in the server response to any request for a resource in the directory "/myaccount" at your Web server:

    Location: /moving/

    . BTW, the browser should also append the original fragment identifier automatically if that's also what you want. See s7.1.2 of rfc7231.

    If you want to utilize irules, here's a simple one:

    when HTTP_REQUEST {
    if {[HTTP::uri] starts_with "/myaccount"} {
        HTTP::respond 301 Location "/moving/"
    }
}

    .

  • Kai_Wilke's avatar
    Kai_Wilke
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Jul 27, 2016

    Hi Brett,

     

    Yann Desmarest and I already told you two possible solution to support your fragment redirection requirement...

     

    https://devcentral.f5.com/questions/redirecting-a-url-that-shares-a-common-pre-path-but-is-an-entirely-different-page-https-fqdn-myaccount-forms-moving-47859

     

    Cheers, Kai