Hi Elijah

You can use the Umbraco events to automatically populate the umbracoUrlAlias property value when the document is saved.

This thread shows an example of setting the pageTitle property on the ContentCreated event. Take a look at the Saving event documentation too.

This isn't exactly what you are after but you can also override the default url segment (not the whole url) with umbracoUrlName.

The magic property names work and are simple to implement but for full control you should look at implementing a custom ContentFinder and UrlProvider. You can use these to override the Umbraco routing. You could implement the custom UrlProvider to return only the page name (excluding all parent nodes) and the custom ContentFinder to find the page based on the url.

Dallas

I'm an Umbraco beginner, so there will be a better way, but when we wanted to ensure that all our pages could be accessed via a short URL, we wrote the following into App_Code/SetUmbracoUrlAlias.cs

using System;
using Umbraco.Core;
using Umbraco.Core.Events;
using Umbraco.Core.Models;
using Umbraco.Core.Publishing;
using Umbraco.Core.Services;
using umbraco.cms.businesslogic.web;

namespace Torbay.UmbracoUrlAlias
{
    public class MySaveHandler : ApplicationEventHandler
    {
        protected override void ApplicationStarted(UmbracoApplicationBase umbracoApplication, ApplicationContext applicationContext)
        {
            // call our extra function when saving items
            ContentService.Saving += ContentServiceSaving;     
        }            

        private void ContentServiceSaving(IContentService sender, SaveEventArgs<IContent> args)
        {
            foreach (var node in args.SavedEntities)
            {
                if (node.HasProperty("umbracoUrlAlias"))
                {
                    // have an umbracoAlias property so check it is filled to enable short URLs
                    string n = node.Name.ToLower().Replace(" ", "-").Replace("(", "").Replace(")", "").Replace("?", "").Replace("'", "").Replace("‘", "").Replace("’", "").Replace("/", "").Replace("@", "-").Replace(",", "").Replace(":", "").Replace("+", "plus");
                    string uua = node.GetValue<string>("umbracoUrlAlias");
                    if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(uua))
                    {
                        // umbracoUrlAlias empty so just store the current page name
                        node.SetValue("umbracoUrlAlias", n);
                    }
                    else if (uua.Contains(","))
                    {
                        // umbracoUrlAlias has more than one entry, so check them all, and if the current one is not already there then append it
                        string[] uuas = uua.Split(",".ToCharArray());
                        bool alreadyThere = false;
                        foreach (string u in uuas)
                        {
                            if (u.Equals(n))
                            {
                                alreadyThere = true;
                                break;
                            }
                        }
                        if (!alreadyThere)
                        {
                            node.SetValue("umbracoUrlAlias", uua + "," + n);
                        }                       
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        // umbracoUrlAlias has just one entry, so check it, and if it's different then append the current page name
                        if (!(uua.Equals(n)))
                        {
                            node.SetValue("umbracoUrlAlias", uua + "," + n);
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Our property umbracoUrlAlias, label "Short URL(s)", description "Short URLs in lower case (each one will become a working short URL via Umbraco's umbracoUrlAlias feature) so users don't need the full URL and we can match old Livelink URLs" is of our datatype tby.ShortUrls which uses the Tags property editor (alias Umbraco.Tags), tag group "ShortUrl", storage type "Csv".

And we added a link rel="canonical" href="http://server.com/preferredurl/" tag in the head to help our and other search engines tell that the URLs were the same page

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