[ndoktoruser]

Hello everyone,

just to give an update to whoever has the same problem, I succeeded with my redirection.

I found that the class \vB5_Frontend_Routing (file: vb5/includes/vb5/frontend/routing.php) manages the requests and tries to find out what page should be displayed to the user.

Every page request will fall into \vB5_Frontend_Routing::setRoutes, which will try to create the route to the requested path. And this is the piece of the code:

PHP Code:

    try {
        $message = ''; // Start with no error.
        $route = Api_InterfaceAbstract::instance()->callApi('route', 'getRoute', array('pathInfo' => $path, 'queryString' => $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']));
    } 


My problem was: once I migrated from an existing forum to vBulletin, I had to create redirection for all my existent threads and forums. However, once I have hundreds of thousands of links, it didn't seem smart adding all of them to htacess.

So, once I have a custom routine to create vBulletin path from a legacy path, this is my result:

PHP Code:

    try {
        $message = ''; // Start with no error.
        $route = Api_InterfaceAbstract::instance()->callApi('route', 'getRoute', array('pathInfo' => $path, 'queryString' => $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']));
        // begin: my custom redirection
        if (isset($route) && $route == false) {
            $newPath = MyClass::getVBPathFromLegacyPath($path); # this custom function returns string or false
            if ($vbPath !== false) {
                $route = Api_InterfaceAbstract::instance()->callApi('route', 'getRoute', array('pathInfo' => $path, 'queryString' => $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING']));
                $route['redirect'] = $newPath; # this is important, so vBulletin will create a 301 redirection
            }
        }
        // end: my custom redirection
    } 


As we can see, the code is executed only in the case vBulletin is not able to create a route. And it only creates a route in the case a newPath (which is a vBulletin path, created using vBulletin API) is successfully created.

To me, it seems safe. And I hope the redirect parameter set "by hand" doesn't break things at some point.

So far, in a test environment, everything looks fine.