IIS7 rewrite rule triggers 404 rather than redirecting to new pagw

Question

We recently replaced most of our default pages from default.htm to default.asp.

Rewrite rules work fine if it's a sub-folder, e.g. example.com/help/default.asp where the default.htm was deleted. If I type domain.com/help/default.htm, it correctly shows the new .asp page and no 404 because the default.htm no longer exists.

At the root entering example.com/default.htm does not redirect to default.asp instead sending the user to the 404 page we created.

Tried exact match vs. wildcard, no difference.

Why the 404 and no redirect?

<rule name="homepage" patternSyntax="Wildcard" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="*example.com/default.htm" ignoreCase="true" />
<action type="Redirect" url="http://www.example.com/default.asp" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>

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UPDATE: This works on a subfolder redirect from htm to asp:

<rule name="downloadhome" patternSyntax="Wildcard" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="*download/default.htm" ignoreCase="true" />
<action type="Redirect" url="/download/default.asp" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>

Answer 1

<match url="*example.com/default.htm" ignoreCase="true" />

I think the url attribute matches against the URL-path only, not the hostname. So the above should read:

<match url="^default\.htm" ignoreCase="true" />

This matches "default.htm" in the document root, or use the pattern default\.htm to match "default.htm" anywhere.

This uses patternSyntax="ECMAScript" on the <rule> (to use regular expressions). Or just remove the patternSyntax attribute entirely, since this is the default option

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To have just one rule for both scenarios: a request for the document root and a subdirectory then you could probably do something like the following instead:

<rule name="replacedefaulthtm" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="(.*)default\.htm$" ignoreCase="true" />
<action type="Redirect" url="http://www.example.com/{R:1}default.asp" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>

Where {R:1} is a backreference to the captured subpattern (.*) in the preceding rule.