MVC C# custom MvcRouteHandler - How to?

Question

Does anyone have experiences in providing a custom MvcRouteHandler? In my application I'd like to implement a globalization-pattern like ">http://mydomain/en/about_ or ">http://mydomain/de/about_.

As for persistance, I'd like to have a cookie read as soon as a request arrives and if there is a language setting in this cookie apply it (so a user arriving at ">http://mydomain/_ would be transferred to ">http://mydomain/en/_ for example). If there is no cookie present, I'd like to get the first language the browser supports, apply this one and store it in this cookie.

I guess this can't be done with the standard routing mechanism mvc provides in it's initial project template. In a newsgroup I got the tip to have a look at the MvcRouteHandler and implement my own. But its hard to find a sample on how to do that.

Any ideas? Thanks a lot in advance!

Matthias

Answer 1

You should be able to do this with ASP.NET MVC's default template, I'm doing something similar. Just build your routes as {language}/{controller}/{action}/{id}

Just set a default route that goes to a controller that checks for the language cookie, and redirects the user based on that cookie.

Answer 2

I don't believe a custom route handler is required for what you are doing.

For your "globalized" URIs, a regular MVC route, with a constraint that the "locale" parameter must be equal to "en", "de", etc., will do. The constraint will prevent non-globalized URIs from matching the route.

For a "non-globalized" URI, make a "catch-all" route which simply redirects to the default or cookie-set locale URI.

Place the "globalized" route above the "catch-all" route in Global.asax, so that "already-globalized" URIs don't fall through to the redirection.

You would need to make a new route handler if you want a certain URI pattern to trigger something that is not an action on a controller. But I don't think that's what you're dealing with, here.