Product maintenance is one of the key functions in the product life cycle process. As is well known, as product adoption increases, the application provider should focus more on how to provide an enhanced customer experience to clients. This translates into giving two key and continuous offerings to the client: improve the features of the application and incorporate the latest technologies.

Nonetheless, this poses cost challenges to the platform providers. As the client base increases, platform providers have to necessarily invest in multiple maintenance teams every time they implement the product. For instance, whenever a new feature is added to the base product, it needs to be pushed into individual client implementation.

Moreover, it has to be tested in the respective client environment. This calls for a considerable amount of manual effort (in terms of Deployment and Quality assurance) and time, thereby building up costs.

The solution lies in getting a Single code base across clients that cuts down re-work. This reduces the cost of operating the hosting environment. While this does present hurdles, it can be sorted out.

In multiple client scenarios, the application has different launch links or login pages for each client from the same domain. This can be complex.

This can be overcome by the Internet Information Services (IIS) with a URL Rewrite feature. It helps in creating rules for a rewrite of URL and redirection by checking the conditions of the requested URL from a browser. All the clients from the single hosted site will be under one domain name, and redirection to their respective login page happens based on the tenant name. In effect, physically, there may be different login pages for different clients in a single code base application.

So how do we enable two different launch links for tenants under a single domain?

Remove the default launch page set in IIS for the hosted site of the single code base. For example, let us look at the following URLs, which contain the physical filename for the login page.

1) Https://TenantOne:Domain/TenantOneLogin > Tenant one’s login page
2) Https://TenantTwo:Domain/TenantTwoLogin > Tenant two’s login page

Based on the above links, we can create rules based on conditions. If the launch URL contains the name TenantOneLogin, then redirect to the login page of tenant one with the URL displayed in the browser as Https://TenantOne:Domain/. Similarly, for the tenant two as well.

A URL rewrite is useful not just for handling multiple logins for single applications, but it also has many other benefits. These include:

  • Redirect from HTTP launch of a site to https
  • Adding or removing the prefix WWW to site
  • Framing of user-friendly URL
  • Keywords mentioned in the URL helps increase your chances of your site popping out in any search engine.

Although it comes with so many advantages, a URL rewrite is recommended for startup websites as it might affect the reputation of more significant sites that are already established in various search engines.

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