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View Full Version : image association to URLs containing Windows illegal characters

daveyboy
07-14-2007, 06:05 PM
Hello

I would like to associate relevant individual images to my url results.
As my site is database driven, every page has the same Head data and therefore I cannot use the ZOOMIMAGE tag as the image path would be the same for every page.

I am therefore trying to associate by naming each image file I want to display to match the URL name as suggested.

However, my page URLs contain a “?”

e.g. www.domain.co.uk/index.asp?function=DISPLAYCAT&catid=17

Windows filenames obviously cannot contain this illegal character to enable my image to be called:

index.asp?function=DISPLAYCAT&catid=17.jpg

Are there ways around this?

Thanks.
Ray
07-16-2007, 01:29 AM
As my site is database driven, every page has the same Head data and therefore I cannot use the ZOOMIMAGE tag as the image path would be the same for every page.

This should not be a limitation of your site being database driven. On the contrary, it should be very possible (and desirable) to have different <head> data for a database driven website, as you should want a different <title> and meta description tag for each page. This would obviously, not only benefit your internal search results, but also your presence on Internet-wide search engines such as Google.

Your PHP or ASP (or CFM, etc.) scripts should be capable of producing dynamic head data based on your database information. I would suggest looking into this, and along with dynamic title and meta description tags, you should then be able to generate dynamic ZOOMIMAGE tags as necessary.

I am therefore trying to associate by naming each image file I want to display to match the URL name as suggested.

However, my page URLs contain a “?”

e.g. www.domain.co.uk/index.asp?function=DISPLAYCAT&catid=17 (http://www.domain.co.uk/index.asp?function=DISPLAYCAT&catid=17)

Windows filenames obviously cannot contain this illegal character to enable my image to be called:

index.asp?function=DISPLAYCAT&catid=17.jpg

Are there ways around this?

This will not be possible, and it is not a matter of getting around the fact that you cannot use a question mark in a filename. The issue is that when Zoom looks at getting a thumbnail for the file, it will (correctly) recognize that the file in the URL above is "index.asp". The use of the thumbnail settings for prepending/appending text to the filename will apply to this part of the URL only (eg. "index_thumb.asp", or "th_index.asp"). The parameters that follow the question mark do not apply.