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.
Related
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 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
What is the method I need to call to find the root URL for a rails application. For example, I have a site where the address is "https://host:1234/foo/app-main".
What method should I be using to get "https://host:1234/foo/images" to get the absolute url for images in the public url?
image_path(image_name)
Edit: Steve has a good point, this will only get you part of the way there. To get the rest you must be inside of a request (you probably are)
In that case though, you can combine the above with Justice's approach,
"#{request.scheme}://#{request.host_with_port}/#{request.script_name}#{image_path(image_name)}"
This question makes sense only on a per-request basis, since your one process might easily be listening on multiple domain names and on multiple schemes.
"#{request.scheme}://#{request.host_with_port}#{request.script_name}"
See Rack::Request.
I'd like to be able to change the extension of a url and recieve the model in a different format.
e.g. if
/products/list
returns a html page containing a list of products, then
/products/list.json
would return them in a json list.
Note: I like the simplicity of the ASP.NET MVC REST SDK, it only requires about 5 lines of code to hook it in, but the format is specified as a query string parameter i.e. /products/list?format=json which is not what I want, I could tweak this code if there are no other options, but I don't want to reinvent the wheel!
I wrote a blog post that shows one possible example. It's a tiny bit complicated, but might work for your needs.
http://haacked.com/archive/2009/01/06/handling-formats-based-on-url-extension.aspx
You should be able to just use routes in conjunction with the rest sdk
If you have the flexibility to drop Apache or something similar in front of your service, you can always use mod_rewrite to rewrite an external http://products/list.json into http://products/list?format=json which your framework can render more easily.
Instead of "list.json", you could choose "list/json" and use a route like
{controller}/{action}/{id}
Then ProductController.List would be called, with an ID parameter of "json". The .List() action then would decide whether or not to return an HTML view or JSON content.