4

i have two questions. i'm fairly new to MVC and love the new way the controller and views are set up, but i can't figure out how to do the following:

1) make a url like www.homepage.com/coming-soon

for this type of url what is the right way to do it? do you create a controller named ComingSoonController and somehow magically insert a dash via routing? note i do NOT want underscores as that's not in the best interest of SEO. or is coming-soon some action name on some other controller that is not in the URL and use the [ActionName("name-with-dash")] attribute?

2) facebook, linkedin and twitter have urls like www.facebook.com/[profile name]. how would this be done in MVC? obviously the [profile name] is dynamic. and the code would obviously live in a controller called, say, profiles. so it seems to me that you would have to make MVC smart enough to know when that second part of the URL is a profile name and NOT a controller, and route it to the right action on the profiles controller? is this easier than it sounds?

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3 Answers 3

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3

1) It depends if coming-soon is dynamic part or not. I'll presume it is and would suggest something like this:

Global.asax

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
 routes.MapRoute(
                "Page", // Route name
                "{pageName}", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Home", action = "Page"} // Parameter defaults
             );

}

public class HomeController : Controller
{

 public ActionResult Page(string pageName)
 {
  return View();
 }
}

2) You can resolve this same way as I've shown above, but keep in mind that order of routes is important. And that first one that matches wins. If you want two actions that have different logic but similar url structure www.mysite.com/coming-soon and www.mysite.com/{profile name}, presuming that first url has static part and the later dynamic you could do something like this:

Global.asax

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
 routes.MapRoute(
                "Coming-soon", // Route name
                "coming-soon", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Home", action = "ComingSoon" } // Parameter defaults
             );

 routes.MapRoute(
                "Profiles", // Route name
                "{profileName}", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Home", action = "Profile"} // Parameter defaults
            );
}

public class HomeController : Controller
{
 public ActionResult ComingSoon()
 {
  return View();
 }

 public ActionResult Profile(string profileName)
 {
  return View();
 }

}
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7 Comments

cool i will try this. so the order matters here because you don't want the dynamic profile action name to be used if there exists a controller name correct? for example www.website.com/controllername will win over www.website.com/[profilename] when [profilename] happens to be "controllername".
basically yes, with correction it's action name not controller name. if this resolves your problem, please mark it as an answer ;)
@ frennky your solution works great for coming-soon, and is almost there with the dynamic part. the only thing i'm missing now in the dynamic part is the parameter to the action "Profile". so in your code example, i just tested it and it correctly routes www.website.com/[profilename] to the home controller onto action Profile. but Profile takes a parameter ID that is actaully the [profilename]. since profile names on my site are unique, this serves as a good unique identifier. so how modify that routing object to take the {profileName} of the URL and pass it as a parameter?
i also realize i can easily solve this problem by creating a url structure like www.website.com/profiles/[username], but id like to make it like the other sites do: www.website.com/[username] and pass username as a parameter on the profiles controller to the profile action.
OK i figured it out. i approached it form a different way. your routing code works perfectly. and i simply do this in the controller code to get the parameter i need to look up the user: Request.RawUrl.Remove(0, 1); which is what i need from the url as the parameter. no need to change the routing code. thanks!
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3

You could create a custom route handler be allow hyphens in the urls:

Create a new handler

public class HyphenatedRouteHandler : MvcRouteHandler{
        protected override IHttpHandler  GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
        {
            requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"] = requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString().Replace("-", "_");
            requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"] = requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString().Replace("-", "_");
            return base.GetHttpHandler(requestContext);
        }
    }

...and the new route:

routes.Add(
            new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", 
                new RouteValueDictionary(
                    new { controller = "Default", action = "Index", id = "" }),
                    new HyphenatedRouteHandler())
        );

MVC Hyphenated urls

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Comments

3

I've developed an open source NuGet library for the first problem which implicitly converts EveryMvc/Url to every-mvc/url.

Dashed urls are much more SEO friendly and easier to read. (More on my blog post)

NuGet Package: https://www.nuget.org/packages/LowercaseDashedRoute/

To install it, simply open the NuGet window in the Visual Studio by right clicking the Project and selecting NuGet Package Manager, and on the "Online" tab type "Lowercase Dashed Route", and it should pop up.

Alternatively, you can run this code in the Package Manager Console:

Install-Package LowercaseDashedRoute

After that you should open App_Start/RouteConfig.cs and comment out existing route.MapRoute(...) call and add this instead:

routes.Add(new LowercaseDashedRoute("{controller}/{action}/{id}",
  new RouteValueDictionary(
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }),
    new DashedRouteHandler()
  )
);

That's it. All the urls are lowercase, dashed, and converted implicitly without you doing anything more.

Open Source Project Url: https://github.com/AtaS/lowercase-dashed-route

When it comes to the second problem, you can do this either by making your own routes or handling not found with a custom error handling mechanism, but the routing will be faster if you restrict the profile urls to concur to some rules (like don't have any slashes) so that you can distinguish it from other urls much more easily, like from content file urls i.e. .css .js etc.

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1 Comment

I have implemented your library and works perfectly. I do however have 1 small issue, I am using multiple routes and not just the default, these were currently being called using the "name" tag within the generic MapRoute() settings, how can i implement this with your library?

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