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asp.net-mvc-3appharborfunnelweb

Handling URL's with AppHarbor without Modifying All My Controllers

I'm trying to host an MVC 3 application (FunnelWeb) on AppHarbor. For a reason that's still not clear to me, when my route is only a Controller+Action (e.g. mysite/admin is Admin+Index and mysite/login is Admin+login) everything works fine, but if I have anything else in the route (e.g. a variable like {*page}) my URL will be mysite:12345/mypage (where 12345 is a port number assigned by AppHarbor and mypage is the name of the page I'm requesting). This makes the request fail as the port 12345 is not publicly exposed.

AppHarbor uses load balancing to distribute the request between multiple IIS's. This is their way of doing stuff and this is why internally the requests are routed to some non-standard ports. I don't have a problem with that, but I have problem with MVC that tries to route me to that internal URL.

I'm not pointing fingers here; it's nobody's fault :) so let's move to the question:

  1. Why there is a difference between requesting a route with Controller+Action only and requesting a route with a variable like {*page}? Be technical please :)
  2. Here is an example of how to handle requests in AppHarbor, however, it seems that it requires me to modify all my controllers (OMG). Is there any way to implement this without modifying my controllers?
  3. Any other suggestions are welcomed :)

Thanks in advance.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, the behaviour that I observed matches the conclusion that I reached. However, the issue has nothing to do with ASP.Net MVC routing. The short story is, FunnelWeb forces lowercase URL's, so, whenever it receives a request to a resource it convert it to lowercase, if needed, and issue a 301 response. The problem is, when creating the URL for the 301 response, the request URL (absolute URL) is now the URL used when the request made from the load balancer to IIS and not the one made from the client; hence, the request fails.

Solution

  • This is known issue with FunnelWeb url generation on AppHarbor. When using standard MVC methods to generate relative URLs, this is not a problem. AppHarbor has a short guide and sample on how the generate public URLs in the knowledge base.