I know there are a lot of utility and helper classes/methods for generating URLs and links from internal routes and controllers. But how would you tackle the below in MVC 3?
In a razor file someone has defined this:
Website
ExternalURL in this instance will hold values like www.yoursite.com, without any prefixes. Hard-coding an http:// at the start is an obvious no-no but how best to handle this?
It's not so bad to hardcode http:// in your case, but if you want to avoid it, I see few options, but maybe most correct will be to extend your model with property #Model.Details.ExternalUrlLink or something like that. In getter you can do any logic what you want over original value, e.g. concatenate http:// prefix if it's not presented
Related
Am new to using Umbraco. I need to create Urls with an an optional parameter on the end e.g.
mysite.com/people/john
mysite.com/people/jane
etc
however by default Umbraco appears to require a separate page for each person. Is there a built method in Umbraco that will allow me to define the last part of the Url as an optional parameter or do I have to write a custom route for it?
Thanks
You have a couple of options here.
Use IIS URL Rewriting to rewrite your URLs under the hood and rewrite /people/john to /people/?person=john say. Then you can pick up the person from the query string on the page.
Write a custom URL Finder that looks for the URLs and does some stuff under the hood, like get the people page, and then set a context item with the person name in for you to use in your views etc.
You could write a custom route for it. Custom routing in Umbraco is slightly different to in normal MVC. Here is a blog post detailing how you can do it: http://shazwazza.com/post/custom-mvc-routes-within-the-umbraco-pipeline/
For some reason it thinks the target is an Apache server - I suspect?
The MVC is V5.2.3 and its dependancies are correct as per nuget
. I have searched and searched to no avail.
EDIT
The code is simply #Url.Action("Action", "Controller")
So I created a brand new MVC project and using exactly the same code the correct code was returned.
http://localhost:53143/Controller/Action
EDIT 2
I removed my web.config files as the problem is not there.
I got in touch with an expert and he looked at the project and answered as below.
(BTW I have 'cgi-bin' in a route as there are old URLs out in the wild that relate to my domain previously being hosted on an Apache server and which I cannot change.)
The answer
I digged a little more into the source code of the mvc helpers and, yes, the two issues (I had a similar problem Html.BeginForm with overload causes form action to be '/cgi-bin?action=Index&controller=Home' and so the HomeController is bypassed) are related since Url.Action and Html.BeginForm boil down to calling one and the same method: UrlHelper.GetUrl... Now, what this method does is:
Retrieve the current URL including controller, action, area...
Add or replace the parameter(s) you specify,
Find the best matching route! <==
If there are any route variables - push the provided parameters into those variables.
Stick the rest of the parameters into the query string <==
I have deliberately highlighted point 3 & 5, with point 3 being the most important. So, UrlHelper.GetUrl (and Url.Action and Html.BeginForm respectively) needs a route and it searches through the available ones to find the first match.
Now, here comes the problem with your mixed webforms-mvc app - an issue which is not present when you are dealing purely with MVC: You are using MapPageRoute!!! Please, note that it is different from MapRoute. And MapPageRoute uses the PageRouteHandler class to create the route whereas MapRoute uses the MvcRouteHandler class and it makes all the difference because PageRouteHandler creates the route in such a way that it's always a good match for UrlHelper.GetUrl("ActionName", "ControllerName") with the action name and controller name being thrown into the query string as parameters (point 5).
So, what happens with your set-up is that Url.Action is searching for a route and is hitting the first one created by MapPageRoute and in your case this is:
routes.MapPageRoute("cgi-bin", "cgi-bin/{*theRestcgi-bin}", "~/home/Search.aspx");
That's where that arcane cgi-bin part of the query string comes from, giving the impression that the framework is actually searching for some virtual/physical folder.
As for the proper solution: either define a suitable route or specify the url as a simple string the way you have done. I think, your solution is the better one as you won't have to move around the route definitions in the RouteConfig class.
I'm learning how to do routing in MVC. It seems to me that the routing API only solves half the problem. I can easily see how to map incoming URLs to controller actions and params. However, it is not obvious to me how to generate these routed URLs in the source code of my pages.
For example, in one of my views, I use this code to get the route URL:
<a class="listingResult" href="#Url.RouteUrl("ListingSEO", new { id = Model.Listing.ID, seoName = ListingController.SeoName(Model.Listing.Title) })">
This seems like poor coding practice to me for several reasons:
If the route changes in the future, I may have many places in my View code that will need updating.
The View now requires knowledge of the ListingController (maybe this is not a big deal?)
I've lost strong typing on my input params, and if I misspell the param names, my code is broken, but this doesn't generate compile warnings.
How do I observe good coding standards when I am generating route URLs? The alternative seems to be putting static functions in the controller to generate routes, which would at least address concerns #1 and #3. If I worked with you and you saw the code above, how unhappy would you be?
My recommendations:
Generate URLs in the ViewModel, not the View: This will keep your views cleaner and logic free. You can pass the UrlHelper instance from the controller to the ViewModel, which will also help for my next point...
Use a strongly-typed URL generation technique: Such as delegate-based, expression-based or code generation.
One of the purposes of using named routes is to abstract the controller/action. Your named routes shouldn't really change. At the most, you'd just change the controller/action they hit, but that happens seamlessly behind the scenes because you're using named routes.
Your view requires knowledge of the controller because you've added a dependency on it. This is bad for a number of reasons. There's many different ways you could handle this that wouldn't require a dependency on the controller, depending on what it is you're actually doing here, but at the very least, you should simply use a utility class, so at least it wouldn't be controller-specific.
The route params are intentionally not strongly-typed, because routes are flexible by design. You can pass anything you want to the action, with or without a parameter to catch it (you can use something like Request to get at it without a param).
I created a sitecore year/month/day folder structure in the content tree, when i view each article under the folder node, the url could be http://local/landing/year/month/day/article1.aspx, how could I make the url like this: http://local/landing/article1.aspx?
just remove the year/month/day structure in the url.
Is there some function in sitecore like remove or hide special templates in the frontend url ?
Any help , Thanks .
You can do it in 2 ways:
Use IIS 7 Url rewrite module to change the url. This way the url will be rewritten before it gets to sitecore and you don't need to change any code. You can find more info at the iis website
You can create a custom Item resolver and add it to the RequestBegin sitecore pipeline. Alex Shyba wrote about it here.
It sounds like you may have thousands of these items, but even so, you may want to use the built in functionality of Sitecore and consider creating aliases for each of these items. Programmatically creating an the alias on an ItemSaved event or ItemCreated is probably easiest.
As #marto and #seth have said, you can use URL rewriting or aliases to solve this.
There is, however, a drawback to doing this, irrespective of how you choose to do it.
If you have very many items (your structure makes it sound like you may do) then either method will require that the URL is unique. Removing the date structure from the URL means that all items in your landing section will require unique URLs (whether inherited from their item names or by some other means). This can impact on SEO for your site, as authors may have difficulty finding an unused name that is also human readable and good for SEO. It's unlikely you want to use ugly GUIDs in your URLs.
2 options
Change Bucket configuration and the set the required folder structure, bucket configuration can be found in Sitecore.Buckets.config file
Extend GetFromRouteValue Item Resolver and overwrite the ResolveItem() method to get the bucket item.
The default GetFromRouteValue class reference can be found in Sitecore.MVC.config file and replace this with your own customized implementation.
We have implemented with customized routing and getting the exact item if the route path matches.
Thanks,
Jisha
I know this question has been asked many times. But people suggest creating custom derived route classes, or writing lowercase everywhere in code (for action links) which is a really dirty way (what if I just decide to make'em all Pascal Cased again? changing hundreds of links?), or they suggest to create HTML helpers to do that (which is not a bad answer). But isn't there a more simple way? I mean something like setting some configuration in web.config file, or using an HttpModule or something else which is both simple, and centralized?
Apart from the options you have already listed, I can think of no other way of producing this result.
In short, the URL needs to be processed by 'something', be it .ToLower(), a Helper Method or HTTPModule.
In most of our applications, we use a Global Static method that performs actions on the desired URI and returns the result.
The following will allow that.. http://mvccoderouting.codeplex.com/ - and much more besides.