CODEWITHSUNDEEP
http-redirectcoldfusion
madison
madison

Reputation: 93

Where do I place a 301 redirect when using ColdFusion?

I found this code for 301 redirects in ColdFusion:

<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved Permanently">
<cfheader name="Location" value="[the URL to be redirected to]">
<cfabort>

What file do I place this code in? Is it the "missing page" that is now supposed to be giving a 301 error when someone lands on it? Or is there a file that's similar to .htaccess that I should put it in?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 781

Answers (1)

Alex
Alex

Reputation: 7833

First of all: 3xx status codes are not errors but redirects.

Your code snippet isn't wrong, but ColdFusion has a more comfy way to do these 3 lines with a single statement:

<cflocation url="[the URL to be redirected to]" statusCode="301">

You can put this tag anywhere in your .cfm template. ColdFusion executes everything up to this point and then stops execution, sets the response header accordingly, discards the output buffer (because 3xx are not supposed to contain a body) and transmits the response (header with location reference).

Note: Your code snippet would include content in the response body (e.g. everything you put in <cfoutput> tags), which is usually not desired. So I strongly recommend to use the cflocation tag for common redirects. It'll also protect you from forgetting to place <cfabort> after it.

For a common scenario like "redirect visitor from a no longer existing page to a new page", you can simply do this:

no_longer_existing_page.cfm

<cflocation url="the_new_page.cfm" statusCode="301" addToken="false">

the_new_page.cfm

<cfoutput>Hello World !!</cfoutput>

Requests to both pages will now point to the_new_page.cfm and return Hello World !!. (This is a redirect, not a rewrite, so the address in the browser will change to the_new_page.cfm in both cases.)

Upvotes: 3

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