How to mask tilde (~) character in C# MVC routing table?

Question

I'm moving my home-baked web site to MVC and got the trouble with url routing. The site already serves several links that contain tilde (~) character in the path; something like http://.../~files/... http://.../~ws/... and I want each of them are handled by separate controller, like filesController, wsController, so my route table looks like

routes.MapRoute( "files", "~files/{*prms}", new { controller = "files", action = "index", prms = "" } ); routes.MapRoute( "ws", "~ws/{*prms}", new { controller = "ws", action = "index", prms = "" } ); ...

but when I try to get the result I got the error saying "The route URL cannot start with a '/' or '~' character and it cannot contain a '?' character."

As I understand those characters have the special meaning in ASP.net but is it possible to mask them somehow, at least tilde? Should I parse and route requests like this myself? What the best practice to handle urls like this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I can't see that you can do this. In ASP.NET the tilde character represents the root of the application, and routes internally will use it to rebase their URIs. You might be able to do it at a higher level (like the URL Routing module for IIS7) and remap the urls before it his MVC?