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MVC3 gives
you great control over how URLs are mapped to your controllers. It gives you
the ability to define your URLs in a human readable SEO (Search Engine
Optimization) friendly fashion, to remap old URLs to new functionality and
side-by-side utilize classic ASP.NET
sites inside of MVC3.
MVC3 Basics
MVC3 routes are defined in the Global.asax.cs file of
your MVC3 web application. By default, there is only one route defined in the
RegisterRoutes method that looks like the line below.
routes.MapRoute(
"Default", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
);
This route defines the route name, which can be anything as
long as it is unique, the URL template, and the parameter defaults. The default
route that is pre-defined for you maps to Controller/Action/id. You can add
additional routes by copying the same line and adjusting the URL parameters and
the related default values.
Custom MVC3 Routes
One of the many factors frequently considered by search
engines to determine the relevance of a particular page to a particular search
term is whether or not the URL link itself includes a particular term. In a
classic ASP.NET site for a magazine, you might have a URL that looks
like www.internet.com/ViewArticle.aspx?id=123.
This URL passes the ID number of the article to view, but the URL itself
doesn’t describe the content in any human readable way. If the URL instead was www.internet.com/MVC3_Routing/123
a human-or a web crawler-could read that and know that the article is about MVC3
Routing.
Another frequent use of custom routing is to allow multiple
sites to link to the same location while providing additional data about where
they came from. For example, if you had a link to a product page and you wanted
to provide custom co-branding based on which one of your partners linked in to
a page, you could do so by including a “partner name” variable in the link. A
link like this could be to www.internet.com/PartnerA/Article/123
or www.internet.com/PartnerB/Article/123
for example. This would allow two different sites to link to the same article
while providing their own information in the process.
The code block below defines a new route called ArticleRoute
that defines a new parameter called article in addition to the standard
controller and action.
routes.MapRoute(
"ArticleRoute",
"{article}/{controller}/{action}",
new { article="Unknown", controller = "Home", action = "Index" } );
You can access this custom article part of the route in your
controller by accessing the RouteData object.
RouteData.Values["article"]
To access the RouteData object in your Razor views,
use the @Url.RequestContext.RouteData object.
When you are constructing URLs that use string data such as
article titles or author’s names, you will need to use some form of
URL-friendly encoding. The easiest method is to use HttpUtility.UrlEncode(“Your
String”) which will replace all of the URL unfriendly characters with the
appropriate HTML escapes.B This method is web spider friendly but not
necessarily human readable URL friendly.
It is very important to remember that any data in a URL is
easily user manipulated and shouldn’t be trusted. It is not an appropriate
place to pass application variables between pages unless they are of a nature
that it would be acceptable if the user manipulated them.
Re-mapping Routes
From time to time it is necessary to re-route an old URL to
a new location. Traditionally you would use a redirect page to let users know
to update their bookmarks and include a link to the new location. Sometimes it
is impractical or even impossible to change URLs as is the case when you have 3rd
party software systems set up to access and scrape particular URLs.
If you wanted to route MyRazor.cshtml page to your MVC3
Home/Index controller, you can do so by defining a route like the one below.
routes.MapRoute("RT", " MyRazor.cshtml ",
new { controller = "OtherController", action = "Packed" });
Including Classic ASP.NET as a Sub-directory in an MVC3 Web Application
If you have a large classic ASP.NET web site that you
need to incrementally transition to MVC3 you can put the entire classic ASP.NET
web site in your MVC3 web site as a sub-directory. You can then call the
IgnoreRoute method seen in the code block below to tell MVC3 to not handle that
particular URL path.
routes.IgnoreRoute("OldClassicASP/");
Constraints
You can define additional constraints to your defined routes
to insure that the values passed for particular parts of your route are valid.
This is useful not only for general security related needs but is also useful
for scenarios where you might want to have additional routing logic in place
for particular routes.
routes.MapRoute(
"ColorPath", // Route name
"{color}/{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
, new { color="blue" }
);
In the example route above, a new anonymous object is added
to the MapRoute path call that adds a constraint to this path. The route will
only be used if the color is blue.
Namespaces
In large ASP.NET MVC3 applications you can potentially have
hundreds of controllers. This can become problematic because the .NET
Framework looks in the Controllers folder and all sub-folders looking for
controllers to match up with the defined routes.
To help you organize your code, you can add namespaces to
your routes to constrain the controllers the route will match to particular
namespaces. The route below will only use controllers defined in the Home.Guru
namespace.
routes.MapRoute("NamespacedRoute", "Cool/{controller}/{action}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } , null,
, new string[] { "Home.Guru" });
Global Filters
If you want to define code that runs before or after your
routing calls, you can define a global filter. Global filters are registered in
the Global.asax.cs file by adding a line to the RegisterGlobalFilters method.
This method, by default, registers the HandleErrorAttribute that is used to
handle error conditions in ASP.NET MVC3 applications.
If you wanted to add a copyright notice at the bottom of all
of your pages, you could add a global filter attribute that overrides the
OnResultExecuted method which is run after your page has run.
public class CopyrightNoticeAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute
{
public override void OnResultExecuted(ResultExecutedContext filterContext)
{
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Write(String.Format("<h1>Copyright {0}</h1>",DateTime.Now.Year));
}
}
Once your custom attribute has been written you can add it
to the global.asax.cs file.
public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)
{
filters.Add(new CopyrightNoticeAttribute());
filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute());//Default in MVC3
}
Conclusion
Understanding how to customize and control the routing in
ASP.NET MVC3 helps you organize your solution and gives you powerful tools to
maintain your web application. Additional tools like global filters give you
the ability to add code that cross-cuts your MVC3 views and can even add
sophisticated logic to re-route your controllers.
