How to use ASP.NET Routing in a Quote of the Day Website

Good Afternoon,

A client is interested in creating an ASP.NET 2.0 website whose purpose is to serve up a "quote of the day". He wants the quotes on static content pages all attached to the same master page. The quote pages must be viewed in a certain sequence, and site browsers cannot view any other pages than the starting page when browsing to the site. That is, everyone must go to page 001.aspx when entering the site.

Two Questions: 1. The content pages are going to be created by the client using an excel data source and a merge process by which each quote page is created eg. 001.aspx, 002.aspx etc. This seems clunky to me at best. Would ASP.NET Dynamic Data be a better solution here?

2. I'm new to ASP.NET Routing and URL Rewriting as a whole. How would I setup a route table to ensure that users always entered the site on the same entry page, and create a route table such that default.aspx resolves to 001.aspx?

Thanks, Sid

I would suggest to use the excel sheet as a data source and handle viewing the 'Quote pages' by paging through the result set obtained from said data source.

If your client is concerned about SEO, he must recognize that his requirement to have only one entry page defeats his One-Quote-One-Page-Is-SEO-friendly.

I don't think the effort to distinguish between a human user and a search bot is worth it.

Anyway googlebot is capable of indexing pages with URL parameters thus allowing to be SEO friendly without generating static content (other bots should be as well).

Possible solution

To allow search bots to index your Quotes you have a query parameter for the date of the Quote.

If you want to enforce human users (hackers don't count ;-)) to enter the site only by the current date you check the browser string and redirect any browser not being know as a search bot to the current date if the referer is not equal to the previous date.

This solution should give you a reasonable result without too much overhead.