It may be this way for everyone, but when a page has worked for a while, I have a tendency to not go back and look at it unless I need it for a reference.
So this morning when I hit one of my page links just to make sure my content page code was running, the page didn't load. Others did, so what's wrong with that? This is obviously a failure in the QA department... oh, that's also ME :)
I checked to make sure the page was in the database, and the page table was also still correct.
I accessed the page using the Event= code and it worked fine, but wouldn't work from the friendly name, so that means something in the URLRewriting. I looked at my ExternalRewrite.Config file that I ftp up when I make changes, and the link looked fine on both ends. That's actually where I got the numerical entry I tested first.
Then I looked a little closer at the line in the ExternalRewrite.Config file and realized when I cut-and-pasted the latest article's link in, I didn't bump the rule number for the latest one, and the rule ended up getting overwritten with the next one.
That sucks... so my article has been dead since January 1, and none of the millions of visitors to my site notified me... well ok, both visitors must have been looking at other pages!
Well, aside from remembering this for next time, I think what I'm going to do is invert my ExternalRewrite.Config file so that the latest one gets added on top. That will do two things:
- I'll probably remember why I'm doing it that way and not forget again
- If I do forget, the new link won't get resolved in the rewriting because it takes rules top to bottom... this morning's exercise proved that
I didn't think about the inversion until the drive in, and can't access it from here. I'll post an update tonight after I figure out if it works or not.
Oh, and the article that wasn't coming up was this one:
http://www.wynapse.com/CSharp/DataList_ItemTemplate_Helper_Function.aspx
Update:
Inverting the ExternalRewrite.config file worked just fine. Actually I like the way it appears and certainly drives the point home not to forget to change the rule number.