bib.ly – ASP.NET MVC Url Shortener for Bible References

URL design

The site needs to have two kinds of URLs:

1. Fixed pages – I needed a few normal pages like Home, Plugins, and Contact that will look like this:
   http://bib.ly/plugins
   http://bib.ly/contact
2. Parsed URLs – All the other URLs will need to be checked to see if they are a valid Bible Reference. Bit.ly has to check if the URL is a valid id in its enormous database, but we need to actually attempt to read the URL and see if it makes sense as a Bible verse.
   http://bib.ly/John3.16 for John 3:16
   http://bib.ly/Gen12:1-3 for Genesis 12:1-3
   http://bib.ly/1Chr11.22-ESV for 1 Chronicles 11:22 in the ESV
   http://bib.ly/asdfasd12 needs to throw a 404 error.

Controller Setup

Getting this to work was actually really easy once I figured it out. Basically, I hard coded the paths to the static pages in one controller and then setup another controller as a wildcard URL handler.

Global.asax

To handle the Bible references, I used wildcard mapping. The only problem with that is that it breaks the normal “{controller}/{action}/{id}” which usually hooks up a root/home page. This means I needed to manually hook up the “Fixed pages” above.

// Map the home page
routes.MapRoute(
     "home", "", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index"}
);
// Map all sub pages
foreach(String route in new string[] { "About", "Contact", "Plugins", "Feedback" }) {
     routes.MapRoute(
           "page_" + route, route.ToLower(),
           new { controller = "Home", action = route }
     );
}
// Send everything else to the Reference controller to parse
routes.MapRoute(
     "verses", "{*referencetext}",
     new { controller = "Verses", action = "Show"}
);

HomeController.cs

This one is pretty boring. It’s just a list of Views and one post handler for the Contact form.

VersesController.cs

This controller has two actions: Show and NotFound. The Show action attempts to parse the URL into a Bible reference. If it’s successful, it shows a page. If not, you get a 404 error page. This could have been handled in the Global.asax with a UrlConstraint, but I thought this was clearer.

public ActionResult Show(string referencetext) {
     // parse the reference
     Reference reference = ReferenceParser.Parse(referencetext);
     // if it didn’t parse, show the not found View
     if (reference == null) {
           Response.StatusCode = 404;
          return View("NotFound");
     }
     // show the view, using the reference object as the model
     return View(reference);
}
public ActionResult NotFound() {
     Response.StatusCode = 404;
     return View();
}

URLs with a Colon (:) Character

Technically, you’re not supposed to use the colon character in a URL without escaping it. But it’s very common to use a colon to separate a chapter and a verse when giving a Bible reference (2 Cor 5:17; Rev. 22:1-4) so I wanted bib.ly to understand the colon character if someone chose to use it.
ASP.NET, however, disallows the colon character (and five other no-nos) by default. To allow colons, you just have to edit the following line in the web.config file.
Default requestPathInvalidCharacters value

<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="&lt;,&gt;,*,:,%,&amp;,\"/>

With the colon removed.

<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="&lt;,&gt;,*,:,%,&amp;,\"/>

Wrap Up

Hope that gives a basic sense of how the site works. There is a little more code on the C# side to help manage the versions and Bible website links, but the rest of the site’s functionality is mostly just simple HTML and CSS controlled by JavaScript utilizing JSONP to get the Biblical text from their content providers.