Access the web client with a short URL

Normally users will access the web client with an URL like https://myserver/FH/FileHold/LibraryForm.aspx. This will take the user directly to the library page if they are logged in, or first to the login page if they are not logged in.

You can configure rewrite rules in Internet Information Server (IIS) to change how users will access specific URLs in FileHold. This technique works by redirecting a URL you define into an URL that is understood by FileHold.

You should be a skilled Windows administrator to complete the following steps. If you are not, or if you use FileHold Cloud, our professional services team can assist you with this configuration. Support for rewrite rules is not included with your FileCare subscription.

Rewrite rules in IIS are enabled by the URL Rewrite module. This is an optional IIS module which is available at no cost from Microsoft. Information about getting and installing this module is available on the following Microsoft page: https://www.iis.net/downloads/microsoft/url-rewrite. 

Once the module is installed in your system, configuring a rule is fairly simple and can be performed directly in the web.config files or via the IIS management interface. A common request is to access the library page directly from the server root like https://myserver.

Open the URL Rewrite tool for the Default Web Site. If you changed the web site name during installation, open the configuration for the name you installed with. You will choose to add a blank inbound rule.

There are seven items to configure on the Edit Inbound Rule page.

  1. The Requested URL should be set to Matches the Pattern.
  2. Using Regular Expressions.
  3. Following the example above, the pattern is ^$. The field is matching the URL after the server name, so we are looking for an empty value here. Other options are possilbe, for example, to you might shorten access to the administration pages with https://myserver/admin. In this case you would use a pattern like ^admin$.
  4. The action type is Redirect.
  5. The redirect URL depends on where you want this to land. From the example above, you would use /fh/filehold/webclient/libraryform.aspx. This will take you to the main library page. However, if you want users to go directly to the login page, you could use /fh/filehold/webclient/logonform.aspx or /fh/filehold/wc3/identity/account/login if you have version FileHold 17.0 or higher. Many other options are possible.
  6. You will normally uncheck the append query string box.
  7. The redirect type should be Permanent (301) so the browser will automatically perform this URL redirect in the future.
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IIS edit inbound rule

Although this technical note uses the IIS management user interface, this configuration can be performed directly in the web.config file.