ASP.NET MVC actionlinks injecting current variables into them?

Question

currently I have a medium sized MVC project with multiple controllers that support paging through a paging helper.

this works like this

routes.MapRoute(
                "TabletsPaged",
                "Tablet/Page/{page}",
                new { controller = "Tablet", action = "Index" }
            ); //paging in the tablet controller

in my master page i have a nav with a link to all of the index actions of my various controllers. For whatever reason when I change pages on any of my controllers my nav links become /controller/page/x where x is the current page i am viewing, and when in the home controller i the links just appear as /controller. Any ideas why this is going on?

Answer 1

The routing engine takes the values of placeholder variables in the current route (the view you are on) and automatically adds them to all links generated in that view which also contain these variables.

You need to explicitly reset these variables where you don't need the page numbers, that is, when you generate the links for your menu, like this:

ActionLink ("Tablet", "Index", new { page = "" });

---

To your problem with weird link: look at the ActionLink signature - you're feeding it the wrong parameter sequence.

To your use this overload gets hit:

ActionLink (string linkText, string actionName, object routeValues,
            object htmlAttributes);

As the third parameter it expects the RouteValues but instead receives a string, while the fourth parameter expects the htmlAttributes and you're giving it the route values.

Use another overload:

ActionLink (string linkText, string actionName, string controllerName,
            object routeValues, object htmlAttributes);

And just give it "null" as the fifth argument if you're not setting any html attributes.

ActionLink("Patients", "Index", "Patient", new {page = ""}, null)