asp.net mvc help with routing

Question

I have a table of data which contains newsarticles.

ive created standard CRUD views/forms and it has paging too.

eg at the moment i have urls's like this:

// GET: /News/
//      /News/Page/2  

News articles can be archived (a boolean value in the db)

i want a url to map to only archived data in the db or non archived data.

eg /News/Archived/Page/2 should map to page 2 of only Archived items.

and /News/Page/2 should map to page 2 of non archived items.

what do i need to do in global asax to achieve this. and what should the signature of the index method be?

//Signature in controller
public ActionResult Index(int? page)


//Route for paging
 routes.MapRoute(
               "NewsArticles",
               "News/Page/{page}",
               new { controller = "News", action = "Index" }
           );

Answer 1

//Signature in controller
public ActionResult Archive(int? page)


//Route for paging
routes.MapRoute(
               "NewsArticles",
               "News/Archive/Page/{page}",
               new { controller = "News", action = "Archive", page = 1 }
);

I would probably also simplify the routes to not include the word page ie: "News/Archive/{page}" and "News/{page}" but this depends on what other routes you have.

Answer 2

If you want to use the same action on your controller for serving both situations, I'd probably change the signature to something like this:

public ActionResult Index(bool archive, int? page)

Then, you can have two different routes for this. First for the non-archived stuff:

routes.MapRoute(
    "NewsArticles",
    "News/Page/{page}",
    new { controller = "News", action = "Index", archive = false }
);

And then for the archive version:

routes.MapRoute(
    "NewsArticlesArchive",
    "News/Archive/Page/{page}",
    new { controller = "News", action = "Index", archive = true }
);

Now you have the liberty in your action of filtering based on the archive bool. Also, I agree with the others here that the Page text in the URL is redundant. If you decide to remove it, you can just yank it out the routes above and everything should still work. Good luck!

Answer 3

First, I'd recommend getting rid of "/Page". It's not needed. You can default to the first page, and have it pass "1" to your 'Archived(int page)' and 'NonArchived(int page)' methods automatically. Also, if you want the word "/Page/" in your url, you are going to have to duplicate the maps below: one set without "/Page" in the url (as shown below), and another set with "/Page".

Note, MapRoute works in order. If you want /Page, then you have to have those two routes first (News/Archive/Page/{page} and News/Page), before you use the two urls below.

routes.MapRoute(
  "ArchivedArticles",
  "News/Archive/{page}",
  new { controller = "News", action = "Archived", page = 1 }
);

routes.MapRoute(
  "NonArchivedArticles",
  "News/{page}",
  new { controller = "News", action = "NonArchived", page = 1 }
);

If '/news/archive/' is used, page will equal 1. If '/news/archive/2' is used, then page will equal 2, and so on. Same for '/news' and '/news/2'.

Your NewsController would have two methods:

public class NewsController : Controller
{
  [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)]
  public ViewResult NonArchived(Int32 page)
  {
    ...
  }

  [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)]
  public ViewResult Archived(Int32 page)
  {
    ...
  }
}

You could actually skip the 2nd maproute above, if you use the default Index() route. The catch is you'd have to change the action method signature from "page" to "id" - and it will work. I just made it more verbose for more transparency by not using any assumptions from the mvc framework.