Best Practices with MVC Route

Question

If this is asked before just point me in the right direction I am a OO and MVC newbie. I am following along the MVC Storefront(a little outdated now) where they are talking about routes and adding them to global.asax.cs

My question is this: wouldn't it be better if only 1 route is defined and after that everything is done programatically?

I don't want the user to navigate using the address bar.

thank you

Answer 1

First of all, if you define only one route in MVC, i.e. /{controller}/{action}/{id} (which is default btw.), the routing mechanism will work perfectly as every action in MVC must be defined in a controller.

Sometimes you may want to have some special routes, like /users/{id}/{username}, like this page has to create routes that make sense to your users and search engines. This is a very interesting approach very difficult to accomplish in ASP.NET (until 4.0).

IMHO there's nothing wrong having logical guessable route names in your application, it looks a lot better than having mysterious long urls with cryptic paths. Letting the user "guess" the urls is not bad at all.

Answer 2

Well,

ASP.NET MVC routing help's you to extend the URL SEO. At same time you will set a rule so that no human can directly access any resource via altering a url.

Thanks! Sandeep Sachan