Asp.Net MVC Routing - Trying avoid using the same controller in different places and think routing may be an option here.

Question

I'm currently building a site which has a bunch of main categories and in each category you can perform a search.

Basically, I want my addresses to work like this...

When the website loads (as in when someone goes to www.mySite.com) it will redirect them to the default category.

www.mySite.com/Category

Then when you search within a category, the results would come up in a page like the following.

www.mySite.com/Category/Search

I want to put everything in one controller and have one main view for the Category and one for the Search, I would then render these based on which category is currently being viewed.

Can this be done, maybe with routing? I don't want to have to create a different controller for each category as it's just duplicating a lot of the code.

Answer 1

Yes, routing can save you here.

You can either add a bunch of Actions to your Controller, or in routing, you can do something like this:

routeCollection.MapRoute("Category1", "Category/Category1", new { controller = "Category", action = "Search", id = "Category1" });
routeCollection.MapRoute("Category2", "Category/Category2", new { controller = "Category", action = "Search", id = "Category2" });
routeCollection.MapRoute("Category3", "Category/Category3", new { controller = "Category", action = "Search", id = "Category3" });

and so on. I assume you have a list of categories from a data store, and if so, you can just loop through them adding categories as you see above.

Let me know if this doesn't make sense, or I didn't solve your problem, as I'm not 100% sure what you're going for here :)

Answer 2

Yes, it can be done through routing.

Something like:

routers.MapRoute(
   "Category",
   "Category/[action]",
   new { controller = "Category", action = "Index", category = 1 });

Answer 3

If you want to limit yourself to only on possible controller you can do this:

routes.MapRoute(
            "Default", // Route name
            "{category}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Categories", category="DefaultCategory", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } 
        );

If you do it this way you can address different controllers:

routes.MapRoute(
            "Default", // Route name
            "{controller}/{category}/{id}/{action}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", category="DefaultCategory", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } 
        );

Based on your comment you would have do go in this direction:

routes.MapRoute(
            "Categories",
            "{category}/{action}",
            new { controller = "Categories", action = "Index" },
            new
            {
                category=
            new FromValuesListConstraint("Category1", "Category2", "Category3", "Category4", "Category5")
            }
            );

// all your default routing
routes.MapRoute(
            "Default", // Route name
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
        );

FromValuesListContraint is only a sample for the simplest case if you have only a few categories. If you have dynamic categories that come out of a database you have to do a different implementation, but still can follow my example with IRoutecontraints.

Here is the Sample IRouteConstraints Implementation (FromValuesListConstraint):

public class FromValuesListConstraint : IRouteConstraint
{
    private List<string>_values;

    public FromValuesListConstraint(params string[] values)
    {
        this._values = values.Select(x => x.ToLower()).ToList();
    }

    public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection)
    {
        string value = values[parameterName].ToString();

        return _values.Contains(value.ToLower());
    }
}

The reason why you have to do this whole IRoutConstraint thing here is otherwise you would not be able to use you default route because a request for www.mysite.com/mycontroller or www.mysite.com/mycontroller/myaction would match the categories route.