asp.net mvc - Web.config urlMappings - works for local pages, not remote pages

Question

I have a MVC4/.Net 4 website running on IIS 7.5. In my web.config file I have the following in my block:

<urlMappings enabled="true">
 <add url="~/2013calendar" mappedUrl="~/CustomerService/RequestPocketCalendar" />
 <add url="~/teachers" mappedUrl="http://www.somexternalsite.com/teachers/" />
</urlMappings>

The local redirects all work great, but anything that is redirecting off the site, such as the /teachers link in the above example return "http://www.somexternalsite.com/teachers" is not a valid virtual path.

What am I missing here?

Answer 1

If I'm not mistaken, the mappedUrl field is a path relative to the root of the application. As such, "http://www.somexternalsite.com/teachers/" is not valid.

If you'd like to configure this to redirect, I would just create a "Teachers" action in your root controller, then use the following:

return Redirect("http://www.somexternalsite.com/teachers");