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Each stack overflow post has the following structure:


Does that mean that the post title is an actual html page stored on the server? Or is the body of the post kept and then inserted into a default html page with the header information and sidebars etc?

What does the id part represent? Is this unique for each question?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jun 6 '11 at 18:39

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The title part of the url is irrelevant and is only there to make the site more user & search engine friendly. You can go to any question by just providing the ID. –  Niklas Jun 6 '11 at 18:39
@Niklas thats useful to know. But as @answered mentioned, how are the pages/posts generated? –  Santiago Jun 6 '11 at 18:52
See: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/10369/… –  fretje Jun 6 '11 at 19:02
note that the title is ignored and only the ID matters (I put a way better question title on this question's URL): meta.stackexchange.com/questions/94042/… –  Daniel DiPaolo Jun 6 '11 at 19:07

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

I'm nearly certain that the pages are generated dynamically and that the information lives in a database somewhere. Static pages for posts would be absurd to maintain. ID is going to be a unique identifier of some kind, yes.

Think of it like this:

<<incoming request - contains ID>>

  $postBody = $dbconnection.query(POSTS_BY_ID, ID);

  echo '<body>';

  echo $postBody;

  echo '</body>';

Obviously, there's a lot left out here, but the idea is that the post content can be quickly retrieved by ID, then dropped into the page template.

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@answered so you think that the information is saved maybe as an object in a DB? The object could then maybe loaded into a html template which is generated on the fly? Just trying to get my head around this. –  Santiago Jun 6 '11 at 18:47
@Santiago - Most definitely. The contents of the post live in a column, are retrieved by id when the request comes in, and the page is generated dynamically using the values looked up. I'll add some pseudo-code shortly. –  g.d.d.c Jun 6 '11 at 18:51
@Santiago here is an MSO question giving some information about the technology that powers StackOverflow, if it is of interest to you. –  David Z Jun 6 '11 at 23:18

You might want to read up on ASP.NET MVC routing schema.

ID is the question ID in the database, the name is ignored.

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