Redirect bookmarked URLS via IIS Rewrite Module is not working properly even though URL pattern matches in testing

Question

I've read so many forums and I did possibly whatever I could. My outbound rule to works in terms of rewriting the URL for SEO purposes but my Redict URL which in case the changed URLs marked in our users' bookmarks does not work. I am using IIS 10.0.

The URL that needs changing:

http://agmodel.com/files/content/insights/publishing/e_clouds.pdf

To: http://agmodel.com/assets/content/insights/publishing/e_clouds.pdf

So only thing I am changing is the string "files" to "assets".

Here is what I've tried:

Attempt 1:

<rule name="Redirect" stopProcessing="true">
   <match url="(https?:\/\/[^\/]+)\/" />
   <conditions trackAllCaptures="true">
      <add input="{QUERY_STRING}" pattern="(https?:\/\/[^\/]+)\/files\/(.*)" />
      <add input="{REQUEST_URI}" pattern="^/assets" negate="true" />
   </conditions>
   <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/assets/{C:2}" appendQueryString="false" redirectType="Found" />
</rule>

I tried to make sure that the first pattern is always the domain the second pattern is files.

Attempt 2:

<rule name="assets-to-files" stopProcessing="true">
   <match url="(https?:\/\/[^\/]+)\/files\/(.*)" />
   <action type="Redirect" url="{R:1}/assets/{C:1}" appendQueryString="false" logRewrittenUrl="true" />
   <conditions>
      <add input="{QUERY_STRING}" pattern="\/files\/(.*)" />
   </conditions>
</rule>

So whenever I test whether the bookmarked old URL will change to the new one, it does not work. It gets green light during pattern match testing in IIS 10.

What am I doing wrong here?

Answer 1

You may use a very simple rule here:

<rule name="assets-to-files">
  <match url="^files/(.*)" />
  <action type="Rewrite" url="assets/{R:1}" />
</rule>

The URL you want to match is http://agmodel.com/files/content/insights/publishing/e_clouds.pdf. The url attribute in match node will receive files/content/insights/publishing/e_clouds.pdf as input, so you want

 ^files/(.*)

It will match files/ at the start of the string and then will capture into {R:1} any 0 or more chars other than newline.

In the action node url attribute, all you need is to specify the assets/ new path and append what you captured into {R:1}.