Handling complex URLs in ASP MVC

Question

I have - I think - a complex URL to deal with in ASP MVC 1.0: All my actions in most of the controllers require two parameters all the time: Account and Project. This is on top of each Action's requirements. This means a typical URL is like this:

http://abcd.com/myaccount/projects/project_id/sites/edit/12

In this example: myaccount is the account name. projects can be a controller, others options are like locations, employees. project_id is the id of a project within myaccount, sites could be a controller, other options are like staff or payments. edit is an action and 12 is the id of the site edited. (hope this is clear enough)

Now one option is to create a route and pass project_id and account into all actions of controllers by adding two extra parameters to all actions. This is not really desired and also I'm not sure the two controllers (projects and sites) are going to work here.

My ideal situation is to use some kind of context that travels with the call to the controller action and store project_id and myaccount in there. The rest of the parameters then can be dealt with in a normal way like:

// sitescontroller
public ActionResult Edit(string id)
{
string account = somecontext["account"];
string project_id = somecontext["project"];
// do stuff
}

Any ideas as to how/where this can happen? Also how is this going to work with ActionLink (i.e. generating correct links based on this context)?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This doesn't quite make sense to me. Why would you have a route that is akin to the following:

{controller}/{id}/{controller}/{id}

?

Answer 2

You first need to add the tokens to your routes like {company}/projects/{project}{controller}/{action}/{id}. Then if you wrote your own IControllerFactory then it would be very easy to push the values from the RouteData into the controller via the constructor or however you wanted to do it. Probably the easiest way to get started would be to subclass DefaultControllerFactory and override the CreateController method.