Rogue URLs

I find that it appears that the SEFAdvance component ( version 1.8.1 )

a) doesn't cope with pages with the same name in different "directories"... if more than 1 exists it generates a 404...
b) returns the same page for any arbitrary directory name within the URL.. i.e. deliberately typed... it shows the category alias for the page defined.

Config is as follows
Set to use category alias as the directory name,
Don't use section
Don't redirect built in SEF URLs
Redirect non SEF URLs
Running with core SEF and mod_rewrite.
Custom 404 page so that unused pages aren't returned

I have downloaded the latest version and checked the changelog - it doesn't appear that anything has changed that would affect this...

Please advise...

a) It should cope with different articles in different categories, but it might be so that section must be displayed too.
It's always a question of balance of performance and features, I can add 3 different search conditions but that requires 3 different database queries. Would you sacrifice site performance for this feature? Would other users benefit from it while all would suffer of increased database load?

b) Not really sure what you mean but might be the same reason as in a).

I'm not sure I understand why one would need to add 3 search conditions
To give a concrete example of a)

lets suppose we intend to have two friendly URLs
../category1/page1.html
../category2/page1.html

I'm finding that the engine searches to find a match for page1.html but can't distinguish between category1 and category2. So if both exist it returns a 404...

Given that we know ( from the config ) that the category is included in the URL but NOT the section then we would need to add just one search to differentiate.

as for b)... what I'm saying is that if ../category1/page1.html exists and the user requests ../categoryZ/page1.html ( no category or alias existing calling CategoryZ) the engine maps this request onto ../category1/page1.html

So ... an extra search against category would be required... but I suspect that the performance impact of this shouldn't be high particularly if the engine hooked into the article save logic within Joomla and created a database table containing section, category and page name... all based on the SEFAdvance config...

The importance of this is that one tries when doing SEO to use page and directory names containing keywords that search engines will recognise. The current implementation would seem to increase the rate at which one "runs" out of options...

Good points.

After some thinking I can agree that it's not huge performance increase because it would only be executed on URL revert, once, not on convert when every link is created.

So I will take a look on that and hopefully add it to next versions.

Hello,

After checking point 1) it already worked (v1.9.6).
If you have
../category1/page1.html
../category2/page1.html
they will return correct distinct pages both of them. If they not it must depend on something else in your settings. In that case send a mail with URLs and access info so I can check.

Point 2): ../something_random/page1.html will now return error 404 in new SEF Advance 2008 v2.0 that will be available soon.