One of the more common tasks in ColdFusion development is passing variables through the URL string. We are all familiar with the idea that the question mark (?) denotes the url query string start, and that name value pairs are separated with the ampersand (&).

I usually avoid using this in display templates, as it isn't great exposing your internal site workings to customers, and with Fusebox it is very easy to pass the URL variables to an "act_" template and remain hidden.

What happens when you want to use dynamic url variables with a URL re writing application like Isapi re write? I've been using Isapi re write in some FuseBox framework application, and it is relatively easy to set up a rewrite rule, as shown below.

Where the url /home/ would actually serve up the content specified in the fuse specified. But this is hard coded. What about dynamic variables?

We can create a regular expression to handle the translation of the variables.

We use a similar URL, but append the dollar ($) 1 = dollar ($) 2 string. In the re write rule we specify that appended variables are transposed into the string using the slash (/) as a separator.

So as an example we could pass a product id of 24 into the rule like this:

It would be rewritten to the more familiar url string. A handy way of continuing to mask the url.