Can anyone suggest a way to accomplish the following in ASP.Net Routing (for MVC 3)?
I want to have URLs where the value which determines the controller is actually part of the id for the page:
/{id}-{controller}/{action}/{further-values}
But I need the id value to include the value used for the controller as well, so in the above if we have the following URL:
/chelsea-football-team/view/2010-2011
I want the {id} value to, ideally, be "chelsea-football-team", the controller to be "football-team", the action to be "view" and the additional value to be "2010-2011".
I have no issues having several routes with the controller value hard coded into the route definition, but I need to be able to have several controller values.
I know that I can simply combine the values in the controller, but that adds a lot of additional, repeated code - so is this accomplishable in any other way?
Why do I want to do this? Because I need to have the team name in full, but part of the team name will always match the controller name so why not combine them in the route?
I want the {id} value to, ideally, be "chelsea-football-team", the controller to be "football-team", the action to be "view" and the additional value to be "2010-2011".
...MapRoute(null, "{id}/{action}/{*furtherValues}",
new {
controller = "FootballTeam",
});
Update after comment 1
You can't combine route parameters in a URL such that a single parameter represents both a variable (id) and a controller, using the standard routing implementation. If you want the id to be "chelsea-football-team", that has to be a self-contained route parameter. You can't combine it in a way that MVC extracts the controller name from the id.
To meet this requirement, you may have to create a custom RouteBase implementation:
public class MyCustomRoutingPattern : RouteBase
{
public override RouteData GetRouteData(HttpContextBase httpContext)
{
// do your coding and return an instance of RouteData
}
}
You would then use it like so:
routes.Add(new MyCustomRoutingPattern(
"{id}/{action}/{*furtherValues}"));
Your RouteBase implementation can then extract the controller from the id parameter. The Pro ASP.NET MVC3 Framework book by Steve Sanderson and Adam Freeman has a section on how to override the RouteBase class.
Related
I had to pass an extra parameter with my action links to indicate where they came from (as I needed to change a back link in the pages accordingly).
As it was a controller name, I decided to name it controller.
e.g. a sample link might be:
#Html.ActionLink(item.Name, "Options", "Questionnaire", new {
id = item.QuestionnaireId,
controller = "templates" }, null)
The receiving action in QuestionnaireController looked like:
public ActionResult Options(int id, string controller)
When the action was hit I noticed the controller value was not template, but instead was the name of the current controller (i.e. QuestionnaireController).
As an experiment I added an action parameter e.g.:
public ActionResult Options(int id, string controller, string action)
the action value was the current action too (i.e. Options).
My work-around for this was simply to rename my parameter to source, but why does MVC bother to map the names controller and action to action parameters? I assume that would apply to any/all Route Mapping values, but what is the purpose of this?
Why does MVC bother to map the names controller and action to action parameters?
I believe it's done as part of the QueryStringValueProvider or one of the other ValueProviders (maybe the RouteDataValueProvider). ASP.Net MVC uses Convention over Configuration, so the framework uses the values provided to populate method parameters. The Controller name, Action name and even the Area name are all values provided in the Url.
I assume that would apply to any/all Route Mapping values, but what is the purpose of this?
The ValueProvider is used for Routing data to determine the matching route to use, it also happens to be the same object that provides the data to populate method parameters. The side affect you are experiencing is most likely not a feature they were trying to implement.
The DefaultModelBinder.GetValue uses the ValueProviders to locate a value and bind it to the model (or method paramater).
I am working on an ASP.NET MVC project. I need to be able to map a route such as this:
http://www.mysite.com/Products/Tennis-Shoes
Where the "Action" part of the URL (Tennis-Shoes") could be one of a list of possibilities. I do not want to have to create a separate Action method in my controller for each. I want to map them all to one Action method and I will handle the View that is displayed from there.
I have this working fine by adding a route mapping. However, there are some "Actions" that will need to have a hyphen in them. ASP.NET MVC routing is trying to parse that hyphen before I can send it to my action. I have tried to create my own custom Route Handler, but it's never even called. Once I had a hyphen, all routes are ignored, even my custom one.
Any suggestions? Details about the hyphen situation? Thanks you.
Looking at the URL and reading your description, Tennis-Shoes in your example doesn't sound like it should be an action, but a Route parameter. Let's say we have the following controller
public class ProductsController : Controller
{
public ActionResult Details(string product)
{
// do something interesting based on product...
return View(product);
}
}
The Details action is going to handle any URLs along the lines of
http://www.mysite.com/Products/{product}
using the following route
routes.MapRoute(
null,
"Products/{product}",
new
{
controller = "Products",
action = "Details"
});
You might decide to use a different View based on the product string, but this is just a basic example.
This is a more specific version of another of my questions: Restful MVC Web Api Inheritance, I hope an answer to this will help me answer that.
Im using ASP.NET web api,
I want to be able to route something like this: [{object}/{id}]/{controller}/{id}.
so i want an array of objects with optional /{id} ending with the 'api endpoint'.
I want to be able to route these:
/houses
/houses/3
suburbs/3/houses
council/5/suburbs/houses
city/8/council/suburbs/houses
ETC
TO
get(List<restRoute>parents, int id){
...
}
restRoute would be an object with a string for the object and an optional int (or guid etc) for the id
Does anyone know where i can start?
I don't want to route every single one individually.
I had also such problems with routing from the box in ASP.NET MVC. Its good way to be used as common routing, but is not so flexible for custom routs.
In WCF Web Api (ASP.NET web api in CTP version) was used attribute based routing.
I think its more flexible, but as negative point - each method should have routing attribute.
Take a look at this blog post:
http://www.strathweb.com/2012/05/attribute-based-routing-in-asp-net-web-api/
It describes how to implement attribute based routing using ASP.NET Web Api. Because such approach is more flexible for routes you can map to methods, it can be helpful for you.
You could use the {*anything} Variable Segmented URL pattern in your route and handle the splitting up and figuring out of what part of the url corresponds to what bit of data in your method:
Global.asax:
routes.MapRoute(
"Special", // name
"{*allthethings}", // parameters
new { controller = "Special", action = "Sauce" } // defaults
);
SpecialController:
public ActionResult Sauce()
{
string data = RouteData.Values["allthethings"].ToString();
string[] items = data.Split('/');
foreach (string item in items)
{
// do whatever you need to figure out which is what!
}
return View();
}
If you wanted to be a bit cleverer about it you could create your own custom RouteHandler to do the splitting. Something like David Ebb's PK routehandler would probably do the trick, with some customisation to fit your requirements in the processing of the route. You could use this to split up the "allthethings" parameter and turn it into your List<RestRoute> format before passing the request on to the Controller
I'm trying to put in some new routes but not sure where to start. What I would like to do is to have my routes translate as follows:
/transport class A/23 translated to /info/classes/A-23
I understand the basics of using MapRoute but can I do things like the above?
I hope someone can give advice.
This seems to me that you're actually after something like UrlRewrite since you're going from one Url to another.
But MVC doesn't rewrite Urls - it maps them to controller actions based on route patterns you provide.
So, if you're asking if you can split up the first url to a controller/action pair (with parameters) then of course you can. You just set up a route with the necessary parameters in the right place. So you could call MapRoute with something like (I would use hyphens for the spaces):
/*route pattern:*/ "transport-class-{class1}/{class2}"
/*with route defaults:*/ new { controller = "Info", action = "ViewInfo" }
Then you could write a controller as follows:
public class InfoController : ControllerBase
{
public ActionResult ViewInfo(string class1, string class2)
{
//presumably get model data from the class parameters here
//and pass it as parameter to below:
return View();
}
}
Although it would depend also if the transport and class constants in this route are actually also variable I guess - in which case you could push those down as route parameters, and into the parameter list of your controller method.
public ActionResult RenderMyThing(IList<String> strings)
{
return View("RenderMyView");
}
How do I pass in strings?
routes.MapRoute("MyRoute", "RenderMyThing.aspx", new { controller = "My", action = "RenderMyThing" });
Is there a way I could pass in strings here?
Secondly, how does ASP.NET MVC know that action is my action, and controller is my controller. Like I saw this in samples, and it does work, but isn't it just an anonymous object with no type?
This is the provenance of model binding: the framework needs to have some instruction as to how to turn a "request", which comes out of the routing context, query string, forms collection, etc., into the parameters that your action method wants.
The DefaultModelBinder will generate a list if it sees that you have multiple key-value pairs with the same key (and appropriately typed/convertible values) - for the details, Phil wrote a good post about this:
If you need fancier binding requirements, you can implement a custom model binder and explicitly define how route values and the other bits get translated into objects (or collections of objects).