MVC5 attribute routing equivalent of route.config route - asp.net-mvc

Say I have the following in my route.config
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
if (routes != null)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes();
routes.MapRoute(name: "category", url: "{category}", defaults: new { controller = "Category", action = "Index" });
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Default",
url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
}
}
How do I do the equivalent of my category route using a routing attributes?
I have tried the following:
[Route("{action=Index}")]
public class CategoryController : Controller
{
[Route("{category}")]
public ActionResult Index(string category)
{
return View(category);
}
}
But this the throws up an error:
Multiple controller types were found that match the URL. This can happen if attribute routes on multiple controllers match the requested URL.
Is it possible or do I need to leave this one in the route.config?

It looks like you are currently not able to do the above with attribute routing only as the only ordering I was able to find was to order the action routes within the controller itself:
[Route("{category}", Name = "Category", Order = 1)]
But this won't help with multiple controller types error. Having done a lot more research about Attribute Routing vs Convention Routing, a lot of the blogs and answers I have come across state that it is probably best to use both types together as certain situations may warrant one or the other.
I think in my case as the order of that route and controller are important, then it is best to use conventional routing for it to make sure it comes at the end (but before the default catch all)

Related

How is URL Routing handled when the URLs are 3+ levels deep? (RESTful URLs)

So let's say you need to have these URLs in your RESTful routing:
/Company/About
/Company/Product/View
/Company/Product/Edit
/Company/Contact/View
/Company/Contact/Edit
I assume that all of these actions would need to be in the same controller (i.e. Company) and I also assume that the routing would look something like this in Global.asax:
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.MapRoute("mission", "Company/Product/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Company", id = "" });
routes.MapRoute("mission", "Company/Contract/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Company", id = "" });
routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
);
}
The problem arises when trying to cram all of this into the one controller (and, again, my assumption is that having all of this in the same controller is correct) because the controller action names will mess everything up. Here is what I mean by this:
In this example, we will need controller actions named the following in the Company controller:
About (for Company/About)
ProductView (for /Company/Product/View)
ProductEdit (for /Company/Product/Edit)
ContactView (for /Company/Contact/View)
ContactEdit (for /Company/Contact/Edit)
These action names, however, don't match what is going to be expected by the routing table. For example, if the user browses to /Company/Product/View the routing would direct flow to the action named "View" in the Company controller. What if the user browses to /Company/Contact/View? The routing will route flow to the same "View" table in the Company controller. How would one route these requests to different Views?
How would you solve this issue? My goal is to be as RESTful as possible.
First to be RESTful you shouldn't be including the actions in the route names. Instead of specifiying edit or view in the route you should be routing through http verbs. I would also suggest using attribute routing
Here's an example controller:
[RoutePrefix("api/company")]
public class CompanyController : ApiController
{
[Route("product"), HttpGet]
public Product ViewProduct()
{
}
[Route("product"), HttpPut]
public Product EditProduct()
{
}
[Route("contact"), HttpGet]
public Product ViewContact()
{
}
[Route("contact"), HttpPut]
public Product EditContact()
{
}
}

MVC 5: Controller's action based routing

Is there a way to have different routing based upon controller's action?
For example:
Default routing
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Default",
url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
this would make the url look like
localhost:/Home/{someaction}/{id}
if the controllers action is
public ActionResult SomeAction(int id)
{
return Content("Sup?");
}
but lets suppose I have this action
public ActionResult AnotherAction(Guid productCategoryId, Guid productId)
{
return content("Hello!");
}
if I don't have any custom routing then the route would look like
localhost:/Home/AnotherAction?productCategoryId=someGuidId&productId=someGuidId
but for this action if I want the route to look like
localhost/Home/AnotherAction/productCategoryGuidId/productGuidId
how would I do that?
I have added a custom route
routes.MapRoute(
name: "appointment",
url: "{controller}/{action}/{appointmentId}/{attendeeId}",
defaults: new {controller = "Home",action = "Index", appointmentId = "",attendeeId="" }
);
but how do I say a controller's action to use that route and not default route.
Also, I read there is attribute routing in MVC 5. Would this help in my case? How would I use it in my case?
Register your custom MapRoute before your default Route. The order of which come first counts in the table route.
Routes are applied in the order in which they appear in the RouteCollection
object. The MapRoute method adds a route to the end of the collection, which means that routes are generally applied in the order in which we add them.
Hope It will help

ASP.NET MVC 4 Routing I just can't figure out

I'm working on a project in ASP.NET MVC 4 and I'm at a bit of a loss with a particular routing. I have a lot of custom routes already in the project.
I am currently making a bunch of controllers for the frontend of the site (publicly visible part) to be able to do thing like abc.com/OurSeoFeatures that gets routed to /OurSeoFeatures/Index
Is there any way to do this so that the above would route to something like /frontend/OurSeoFeature and another page would route to /frontend/anotherpage and also still have my other routes correctly? It seems to me that the above would hit the default route and if I put something like the following it would just catch all the request and would not let me hit anything else.
routes.MapRoute(
name: "ImpossibleRoute",
url: "{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "frontend", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
Am I just stuck with making a bunch of controllers? I really don't want to make one controller like page and put a bunch of actions there as I don't think its very pretty. Any Ideas?
In order to do what you're asking, you simply need to add a route constraint:
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Frontend",
url: "frontend/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "OurSeoFeature", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
constraints: new { controller = "OurSeoFeature|Products" }
);
This constraint means the route will only match controllers with the names OurSeoFeatureController or ProductsController. Any other controller will trigger the default route. However, this wouldn't handle redirecting those controllers to /frontend/..., if that's what you're after. Instead, that gets a little more involved.
Firstly, you'll need to create a class that implements IRouteConstraint, in order to supply the controller names you want to redirect to /frontend/.... The reason we need this now, is because we'll need to access those names in an ActionFilter, and we can't do that if we supply a regex constraint like constraints: new { controller = "OurSeoFeature|Products" above. So, the constraint could look something like this:
public class FrontendControllerConstraint : IRouteConstraint
{
public FrontendControllerConstraint()
{
this.ControllerNames = new List<string> { "OurSeoFeature", "Products" };
}
public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route,
string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values,
RouteDirection routeDirection)
{
string value = values[parameterName].ToString();
return ControllerNames.Contains(value, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase);
}
public List<string> ControllerNames { get; private set; }
}
Next up, the action filter could look like this:
public class RedirectToFrontendActionFilter : ActionFilterAttribute
{
public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
var controller = filterContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString();
var path = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.AbsolutePath;
var controllersToMatch = new FrontendControllerConstraint().ControllerNames;
if (controllersToMatch.Contains(controller, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase)
&& path.IndexOf(pathPrefix, StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) == -1)
{
filterContext.Result =
new RedirectToRouteResult(routeName, filterContext.RouteData.Values);
}
base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
}
private string routeName = "Frontend";
private string pathPrefix = "Frontend";
}
Now that we have those in place, all that's left is to wire it all up. Firstly, the constraint is applied in a slightly different way:
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Frontend",
url: "frontend/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "OurSeoFeature", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
constraints: new { controller = new FrontendControllerConstraint() }
);
Finally, you need to add the filter to FilterConfig.cs:
public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)
{
filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute());
filters.Add(new RedirectToFrontendActionFilter());
}
One warning here is that because I'm checking against Request.Url.AbsolutePath, you cannot pass anything in the path that contains the word frontend. So make sure all controllers, actions and route values added to the path, do not contain that. The reason is that I'm checking for the existence of /frontend/ in the path, to ensure that the matched controllers will only redirect to that route if they they're not already using it.
There are a lot of added things you could do with that setup, but I don't know your requirements. As such, you should treat this code simply as a skeleton to get started, making sure to test that it does what you want it to do.
Updated per comments
I'll leave everything above there, just in case someone finds that useful. To address what you'd like to do, however, we need a different approach. Again, we need some route constraints, but the way I see this working is to flip your idea on its head and make the frontend the default route. Like so:
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Backend",
url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
constraints: new { controller = "Home|Backend" }
);
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Default",
url: "{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "Frontend", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
constraints: new { action = "Index|OurSeoFeature" }
);
Just as before, I've applied some constraints to get the correct behaviour. In particular, for this constraint:
constraints: new { controller = "Home|Backend" }
if you have a lot of controllers that aren't part of the frontend, it might be an idea to implement IRouteConstraint to keep a list of the controller names there. You could even go as far as deriving all of your backend controllers from a base controller, so you can grab all of them with reflection in the IRouteConstraint implementation. Something like this:
public BackendController : Controller
{
//
}
Then:
public AdminController : BackendController
{
//
}
Constraint:
public class BackendConstraint : IRouteConstraint
{
// Get controller names based on types that
// BackendController
}
This same idea also applies to getting the action names of FrontendController for the second constraint. The only thing you need to be careful of here is that you don't have any backend controllers which have the same name as an action on your FrontendController, because it will match the wrong route.
I appreciate the question is over a year old with an accepted answer but the accepted answer involves route constraints when none are necessary. It's really just as simple as:
routes.MapRoute("SEO", "OurSeoFeatures",
new { controller = "frontEnd", action = "OurSeoFeatures"});
The basic idea of the route is controller/action.
So if you want to hit the OurSeoFeatures controller's index action then you have to give your route like
routes.MapRoute(
name: "BasicController",
url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "OurSeoFeatures",action="Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
In your case you have left out the controller from your route url. Please specifiy the controller also as part of URL and have a default controller.

How do I use routes for multi-tenancy in all but one controller?

Our app has multiple tenants. Every tenant has a short code assigned to them that users know them by. I want to use that code in my URLs as a route parameter, and have Ninject inject a DbContext with the tenant's database connection string into the tenant-specific controllers.
So for examine I have a CarController, and every tenant has their own products. The URLs would look like {tenantcode}/{controller}/{action}. I understand how to do this part.
However, I have several controllers that should NOT be instanced by tenant. Specifically, the home controller, and account controller for login/registration. These don't matter.
So example URLs I need:
myapp.com/ - HomeController
myapp.com/Account/Login - AccountController
myapp.com/GM/Car/Add - CarController that has GM's DbContext injected
myapp.com/Ford/Car/Add - CarController that has Ford's DbContext injected
How can I exclude certain controllers from routes? Running ASP.NET MVC 5.
Many thanks to Darko Z for starting me in the right direction. I ended up using a hybrid of traditional routes, and the new attribute based routing in MVC 5.
First, the "excluded" routes got decorated with the new RouteAttribute class
public class HomeController : Controller
{
private readonly TenantContext context;
public HomeController(TenantContext Context)
{
this.context = Context;
}
//
// GET: http://myapp.com/
// By decorating just this action with an empty RouteAttribute, we make it the "start page"
[Route]
public ActionResult Index(bool Error = false)
{
// Look up and make a nice list of the tenants this user can access
var tenantQuery =
from u in context.Users
where u.UserId == userId
from t in u.Tenants
select new
{
t.Id,
t.Name,
};
return View(tenantQuery);
}
}
// By decorating this whole controller with RouteAttribute, all /Account URLs wind up here
[Route("Account/{action}")]
public class AccountController : Controller
{
//
// GET: /Account/LogOn
public ActionResult LogOn()
{
return View();
}
//
// POST: /Account/LogOn
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult LogOn(LogOnViewModel model, string ReturnUrl)
{
// Log on logic here
}
}
Next, I register the tenant generic route that Darko Z suggested. It's important to call MapMvcAttributeRoutes() before making other routes. This is because my attribute based routes are the "exceptions", and like he said, those exceptions have to be at the top to make sure they are picked up first.
public class RouteConfig
{
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
// exceptions are the attribute-based routes
routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes();
// tenant code is the default route
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Tenant",
url: "{tenantcode}/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
defaults: new { controller = "TenantHome", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
}
}
So as I'm sure you know you specify routes in MVC in the order from most specific to most generic. So in your case I would do something like this:
//exclusions - basically hardcoded, pacing this at the top will
//ensure that these will be picked up first. Of course this means
//you must make sure that tenant codes cannot be the same as any
//controller name here
routes.MapRoute(
"Home",
"Home/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
);
routes.MapRoute(
"Account",
"Account/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Account", action = "Index", id = "" }
);
//tenant generic route
routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{tenantcode}/{controller}/{action}",
new { tenantcode = "Default", controller = "Tenant", action = "Index" }
);
//default route
routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
);
This is obviously only good if there are less excluded controllers than controllers that need the tenant code. If not then you can take the opposite approach and reverse the above. Main takeaway here is that (happy to be proven wrong) there is no way to have a generic ignore within an AddRoute call. While there is an IgnoreRoute, that just completely doesn't apply any routing rules and is used for static resources. Hope that helps.

ASP.NET MVC3 Routing various subfolders to the same controller

I'm trying to set up my MVC project to have URLs so that I can go to:
/Groups/
/Groups/Register
/Groups/Whatever
But in my controller, I can also flag some actions as admin only, so that they are accessed at:
/Admin/Groups/Delete/{id}
I would like to keep one GroupController, and have actions so that:
public class GroupController : Controller
{
public ActionResult Index(){
return View();
}
[AdminAction]
public ActionResult Delete(int id){
...
return View();
}
}
Allows:
/Groups is a valid URL.
/Admin/Groups is a valid URL (but would call some other action besides Index - maybe)
/Admin/Groups/Delete/{id} is a valid URL (post only, whatever)
/Groups/Delete is an INVALID url.
I realize this is probably a pretty broad question, but I'm new to MVC and I'm not really sure where to start looking, so if you could just point me in the right direction that would be hugely appreciated.
As we discussed in the comments below, while it is possible to use my original answer below to achieve the routing solution you requested, a better solution is to use Areas, establish an Admin area, and create controllers in your Admin area to handle the administrative tasks for different objects, such as Group, User, etc. This allows you to set up restricted administrative functions more easily, and is both a better design and a better security model.
ORIGINAL ANSWER
What you want can be accomplished by using the following routes:
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
routes.MapRoute(
"Admin", // Route name
"admin/{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
routes.MapRoute(
"Default", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
);
}
However, as Akos said in the comments, it is a much better design to separate the administrative functions into a different controller. While this is possible, I would recommend against using this design.
UPDATE
It is possible to use a RouteConstraint on your Default route to make it fail if Admin actions are requested. The Default route would look like this:
routes.MapRoute(
"Default", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional, // Parameter defaults
new { action = IsNotAdminAction() } // route constraint
);
The RouteConstraint would look like this:
public class IsNotAdminAction : IRouteConstraint
{
private string adminActions = "create~delete~edit";
public IsNotAdminAction()
{ }
public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection)
{
// return false if there is a match
return !adminActions.Contains(values[parameterName].ToString().ToLowerInvariant());
}
}

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