Hello Everyone,
I would like to achieve something very similar to this question, with some enhancements.
There is an ASP.NET MVC web application.
I have a tree of entities.
For example, a Page
class which has a property called Children, which is of type IList<Page>
. (An instance of the Page
class corresponds to a row in a database.)
Note that the owners of the site can add a new page anytime, or delete existing ones, and the URLs should reflect those changes as well.
I would like to assign a unique URL to every Page
in the database.
I handle Page
objects with a Controller called PageController
.
Example URLs:
http://mysite.com/Page1/
http://mysite.com/Page1/SubPage/
http://mysite.com/Page/ChildPage/GrandChildPage/
You get the picture.
So, I'd like every single Page
object to have its own URL that is equal to its parent's URL plus its own name.
In addition to that, I also would like the ability to map a single Page
to the /
(root) URL.
I would like to apply these rules:
- If a URL can be handled with any other route, or a file exists in the filesystem in the specified URL, let the default URL mapping happen
- If a URL can be handled by the virtual path provider, let that handle it
- If there is no other, map the other URLs to the
PageController
class
I also found this question, and also this one and this one, but they weren't of much help, since they don't provide an explanation about my first two points.
I see the following possible soutions:
- Map a route for each page invidually.
This requires me to go over the entire tree when the application starts, and adding an exact match route to the end of the route table. - I could add a route with
{*path}
and write a customIRouteHandler
that handles it, but I can't see how could I deal with the first two rules then, since this handler would get to handle everything.
So far, the first solution seems to be the right one, because it is also the simplest. But still, even in that case I'm not sure how could I make the PageController
to handle the requests.
I would really appreciate your thoughts on this.
Thank you in advance!
EDIT: I now had the time to examine every aspects of every answer I received. I accepted Neal's answer, since he is the one providing the best explanation about how things work. I also upvoted all other answers, since they provide good ideas.