Any way to set up a custom route?

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1

For example:
Anyone visiting

mysite.com/forward/abcd1234

should get redirected to:

forward.mysite.com/abcd1234

where abcd1234 is a variable component.

mysite.com is the domain that I’ll be forwarding to Softr, but there are forwarder routes on my existing website that I don’t want to disturb. I’ve set up a separate subdomain for those, now I need to ensure that the links don’t break.

2

Hi @kt1 and welcome to the community!

I’m not sure I understand exactly what you’re looking for, but I’ll take a wild stab that it could be the URL Redirects feature.

If that’s not it, can you please explain in more detail exactly what you are trying to do in Softr?

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3

The URL redirects feature enables me to redirect one internal route to another internal route.
As I tried to explain using the examples, I want to forward routes with a custom path component to another subdomain entirely.

4

Still hoping for more details. (There are others on this board who are better at guessing than me, perhaps they will chime in!)

5

Let me try.
Let’s say mysite.com is the domain that I’m planning to use for my Softr site. It is currently pointing to my own servers, where I have custom routing set up to handle any URL that follows the mysite.com/forward/<any_variable_here> pattern. Such links correspond to custom pages that generate dynamic content based on the variable in the URL. When I change the domain to Softr, I don’t want to break the routing logic for these links of my app, so I have set up a subdomain forward.mysite.com and pointed it to my own server, which will handle the links that previously followed the mysite.com/forward pattern.

So now I just have to find a way for Softr to forward the old routes to the new ones. Here are some more examples:

mysite.com/forward/abcd1234 should be routed to forward.mysite.com/abcd1234

mysite.com/forward/wxyz7890 should be routed to forward.mysite.com/wxyz7890

mysite.com/forward/foobar should be routed to forward.mysite.com/foobar

6

OK, I get it now.

There are a couple of different ways to solve this.

You didn’t say whether you have a specific list of redirects, or whether you need to create a rule where mysite.com/forward/<anything> will properly redirect.

The first thing I would try is to approach Softr support (use the chat feature in the studio) and ask them if they can set this up for you. I know that they have the ability to load in a long list of specific redirects, but if you are looking for a redirect rule, they may not be able to help with that.

The other way you might be able to get this to work is to create a Softr page for each redirect, and then write some custom code that runs on that page and does the redirect for you in JavaScript.

Finally, there might be a way to get this to work using the custom 404 page feature in Softr, where if the URL starts with mysite.com/forward and the page does not exist in Softr, the 404 page runs custom code to do the redirect.

So the next question is whether you have a defined list of redirects (and if so, how long it is), or whether you need it to be a rule.

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7

Thanks. It has to be a rule because I need it for mysite.com/forward/<anything>.

I’ve tried all the options you mentioned except for the last one.

This doesn’t work because if I make a page /forward in Softr, it’s only displayed if the user goes to mysite.com/forward and does not work for subpaths like mysite.com/forward/<something> (this goes to a 404 page).

What is the way to set up the 404 page to do custom redirects?

8

The docs for the 404 page are here: How to set up a 404 Page - Softr Docs

But there’s another question, which is whether custom code on that page can get the original URL that the user accessed. Checking now…

9

Thanks @dcoletta for nudging me in the 404 direction, I figured it out. :slight_smile:

I made a custom code block on the 404 page and added this:

<script>
var path = window.location.pathname;

if (path.startsWith("/forward/")) {
    var path_part = path.substring(8);
    window.location.replace("https://forward.mysite.com" + path_part)
}
</script>
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10

OK good, that answers my question about whether you can access the original URL.