MVC - Passing path to action in controller - asp.net-mvc

Question

Fairly new to MVC, I would like the URLs of my article pages to be like this:-
http://www.example.com/article1
http://www.example.com/article2
http://www.example.com/article3
How can I set up the routing such that whenever someone types in the above it calls an action called article in the controller and passes the path to it?
I tried something like this but to no avail: -
routes.MapRoute(
name: "article",
url: "{article}",
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "article" }
);

Answer 1

One solution is to add multiple routes.
routes.MapRoute(
name: "article1",
url: "article1",
defaults: new { controller = "<YourControllerName>", action = "article1" }
);
routes.MapRoute(
name: "article2",
url: "article2",
defaults: new { controller = "<YourControllerName>", action = "article2" }
);
Edit:
From OP's comment, it is understood that there would be 'n' number of articles(urls). To deal with that, we can create a custom route handler.
Step 1: Create a new custom route handler inheriting from MvcRouteHandler
public class CustomRouteHandler : MvcRouteHandler
{
protected override IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
{
var controller = requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString();
requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"] = "Home";
requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"] = "Index";
requestContext.RouteData.Values["articleId"] = controller;
return base.GetHttpHandler(requestContext);
}
}
Step 2: Register the new route. Make sure to add this route before default route.
routes.Add("Article", new Route("{controller}", new CustomRouteHandler()));
In the given CustomRouteHandler class, the Controller and Action is hard coded with "Home" and "Index" respectively. You can change that to your own controller and action name. Also you would see a "articleId" setting to RouteData.Values. With that setting, you would get the articleId as a parameter in your Action method.
public ActionResult Index(string articleId)
{
return View();
}
After all the changes, for the url http://www.example.com/article1, the Index() method of HomeController gets invoked with articleId set to 'article1'.
Similarly for http://www.example.com/article2, the Index() method gets invoked with parameter articleId set to 'article2'.