Request handler settings

Information on the request handler settings section

The options in the request handler let us do some useful things. It could be deciding whether or not to use trailing slashes and setting URL replacement for special characters.

Let's have a further look at each option below.

Here is a snippet containing all the default values of the RequestHandler section.

"Umbraco": {
  "CMS": {
    "RequestHandler": {
      "AddTrailingSlash": true,
      "ConvertUrlsToAscii": "try",
      "ConvertFileNamesToAscii": "false",
      "EnableDefaultCharReplacements": true,
      "UserDefinedCharCollection": [
      {
        "Char": " ",
        "Replacement": "-"
      },
      {
        "Char": "\\",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": "'",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": "%",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": ".",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": ";",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": "/",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": "\\\\",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": ":",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": "#",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": "+",
        "Replacement": "plus"
      },
      {
        "Char": "*",
        "Replacement": "star"
      },
      {
        "Char": "&",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": "?",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": "æ",
        "Replacement": "ae"
      },
      {
        "Char": "ä",
        "Replacement": "ae"
      },
      {
        "Char": "ø",
        "Replacement": "oe"
      },
      {
        "Char": "ö",
        "Replacement": "oe"
      },
      {
        "Char": "å",
        "Replacement": "aa"
      },
      {
        "Char": "ü",
        "Replacement": "ue"
      },
      {
        "Char": "ß",
        "Replacement": "ss"
      },
      {
        "Char": "|",
        "Replacement": "-"
      },
      {
        "Char": "<",
        "Replacement": ""
      },
      {
        "Char": ">",
        "Replacement": ""
      }
      ]
    }
  }
}

Add trailing slash

This will add a trailing slash to the URL when <addTrailingSlash> is set to "true". If you don't want to have a trailing slash, set the value to false.

Convert URLs to ASCII

This setting tells Umbraco to convert all URLs to ASCII: American Standard Code for Information Interchange, if set to false the URLs will remain UTF-8.

This setting can be set to try This will make the engine try to convert the name to an ASCII implementation. If it fails, it will fallback to the name. Reason is that some languages don't have ASCII implementations, therefore the URLs would end up being empty.

Convert file names to ASCII

This setting works the same as "Convert URLs to ASCII" above, but for Media item file names.

Enable default character replacements

This setting tells Umbraco to use the default character replacements. If you don't want the default character replacements, set this to false.

Char collection

This settings contains objects with a "Char" and "Replacement key. Each of these objects holds a character that should be replaced and what it should be replaced with.

When something like the following is added to the list, the ñ will be shown as a n in the URL.

{
  "Char": "ñ",
  "Replacement": "n"
}

When managing entries from the collection, you need to do a couple of things for the change to be reflected:

1. Refresh the database cache from the "Published Status" tab in the Settings section of the backoffice.

2. Re-save and publish any node where you want the change reflected.

   • You can also use Publish with descendants... on the root node to update the URL for all descendants.