Prevent Wordpress from Rewriting URL for one template

Question

Variations of this question have been asked, however the scenarios do not match mine and despite my efforts I have not been able to adopt the previous answers to a working solution in my use case.

I have a page template that has a javascript application built into it. This application uses the last parameter in a URL as a parameter for an ajax request, which it runs and then produces results for.

Due to SEO concerns and client requirement, I cannot change or alter the way this request syntax functions, so I must make it work in Wordpress (page is being converted from a Ruby application)

When the client makes a request to:

https://www.wordpresssite.com/service/testing-tool/domain.com

I need to respond with the page that is built using the template at:

https://www.wordpresssite.com/service/results

This part I have working with the following rewrite rule in .htaccess

RewriteRule ^service/testing-tool/([a-z0-9.]+)$ /index.php?pagename=service/results [NC,L]

The rewrite works, however WordPress changes the URL in the browser to

https://www.wordpresssite.com/service/results

This causes the JS to fail as the domain parameter is missing, and it also doesn't meet the requirements previously mentioned.

I though after doing some research here that the issue is the redirect_canonical() action, so I tried removing it from within the template:

// Disable redirect_canonical()
add_action( 'init', 'results_tweaks' );
function results_tweaks()
{
    remove_action( 'template_redirect', 'redirect_canonical' );
}

However this doesn't seem to do it. Reading the WP documentation, I suspect this is because the action is already processed by the time the page loads.

Is there another way I can override this action specifically for this template, and no others? Perhaps another way aside from removing the action?

Answer 1

You can use an internal rewrite instead of .htaccess:

function wpd_service_rewrite() {
    add_rewrite_rule(
        '^service/testing-tool/([a-z0-9.]+)$',
        'index.php?pagename=service/results',
        'top'
    );
}
add_action( 'init', 'wpd_service_rewrite' );

Don't forget to flush rewrite rules after adding / changing them.

Answer 2

You might be able to solve your problem just by changing your rewrite rule to:

RewriteRule ^service/testing-tool/([a-z0-9.]+)/?$ /index.php?pagename=service/results&domain=$1 [NC,L]

Now, from within https://www.wordpresssite.com/service/results you can get the domain via PHP.

Note that I added '/?' to your rule, otherwise it shouldn't work.

Using php you'd get the domain (missing param) using $_GET['domain'].

Hope this helps.