Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Vignette CURLs: The Mystery Revealed

Author:Charlie Wood
Posted:3/10/1999; 9:53:50 AM
Topic:Vignette CURLs: The Mystery Revealed
Msg #:3891
Prev/Next:3890 / 3892

In response to a question on scripting.com a few days ago:

Vignette StoryServer sites use custom URLs, or CURLs, to identify pages. The format usually looks something like this:

http://hostname.com/path/to/file/forceDynamic,templateID,OID,bCaps.ext

The filename consists of four parameters to StoryServer.

forceDynamic gives a hint as to whether a cached version of the page can be used or if dynamic generation is to be forced.

templateID specifies the ID of the StoryServer template to be used to genrate the page.

OID is a generic parameter for passing information to the template. Often the OID is a unique identifier pointing to the content item to be displayed. Fortune.com uses a date-encoding scheme (602YYMMDD) to identify daily news articles. Many sites overload the OID by passing multiple parameters seperated by some URL-friendly delimiter.

bCaps tells the site whether a browser-capability-specific version of the page is requested. In the past, browser capabilities (tables, frames, Java, etc) were encoded in a 16-bit value. Since more than 16 capabilities are now supprted, this parameter is now a boolean value (00|FF) and more processing is done by the web server plugin to determine browser caps.

ext can be any extension, but defaults to html.

-Charlie

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