TYPO3 URL processing order

Question

I have a problem with the order in which TYPO3(4.5.8) processes URLs. Note that I'm referring to the way TYPO3 resolves URL paths internally, not the Rewrite-Rules of the apache configuration. My site requires that TYPO3 must observe the following:

• URLs of non-existent page must be redirected to a special a 404 page with the correct 404 response header (so they are not indexes as proper content pages).
• Non-canonical URL variants (upper/lower case, w/o trailing Slash ) must be permanently redirected(301) to their the canonical counterpart so that Google doesn't interpret these as containing duplicate content.

I've actually managed to get TYPO3 to do both (URL variants actually gets processed correctly out of the box), but the problem is the order: Variants of non-existent pages also get redirected to their supposedly canonical counterparts, before being redirected to the 404 page. I'm afraid that this will disrupt proper indexing by Google, which is the whole point of the exercise to begin with.

So can anyone give me some pointer as to how one goes about correctly configuring TYPO3, so that it processes URL in the correct order, ie first determining the whether a page exists at all before doing anything else.

Answer 1

There is an extension doing this: forcerealurls2

I never used such an extension, because in a sane configuration no links do point to non canonical URLs in TYPO3.