By default, Sitefinity Ecommerce ships with a date formatted URL for the Product Detail page, which comes very handy if you just want to let your users know when the product was published. But as with any other part of Sitefinity, this URL can be highly customized to meet your own needs and make even more Pretty URL or PURL in general. For Ecommerce, having the date in the URL does not usually create an SEO friendly URL.
You can change the default route of products in 2 ways
1. Using the urlFormat in the backend of Sitefinity
2. Extending OpenAccessCatalogDataProvider in your application
Below is the default URL format of products in Ecommerce
Using urlFormat in the backend of Sitefinity –
This option will let you extend the details by excluding the date in the URL. To attain this URL format you would need to navigate to Backend-> Administration-> Settings-> Advanced-> Catalog->Providers-> OpenAccessProvider-> Parameters and then create a new parameter with the name urlFormat and value /[UrlName], this will change product detail URL by excluding the date. Please also note that new products added to the system will get new URL format by default. However for products which already exist,you will have to republish the existing products to get the new URL format.
Below is a screenshot on how the new URL would look like -
Extending OpenAccessCatalogDataProvider -
This option will let you extend the route of product detail in any way you want. You have complete control over the route that leads to the detail page.
- You will need to change the ProviderType to a custom class in your own application.
- Add the code to extend the route.
Above is an image on how the changed URL format would look like, please note that you can get the "DetailRouteKey" in any way you want and feed any string into the URL at this moment.
Also, as above note that new products added to the system will get the new URL format by default. However for products which already exist,you will have to republish the existing products to get the new URL format.
I hope this post was helpful.
Credit and thanks to Venkata Koppaka!