Ways to bind a parameter to a different name in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

I keep running into scenarios where I would like to provide a slightly more intuitive or "well-formed" parameter name for action methods, but with the default behavior, this is turning out to be quite painful. For example, suppose that I have an action parameter like GetWidget(int id). If I want it to be GetWidget(int widgetId), I have to add a new route. It gets worse when you use a library like jqGrid which uses awful names for its querystring parameters: GetWidgets(int? nodeid, int? n_level). Instead, I'd like to have GetWidgets(int? parentId, int? level) or something similar.

So, is there something simple that I'm overlooking? It seems like it should be a very simple thing to tell MVC that my "parentId" parameter should be bound to the value of "nodeid" in the request. I thought about writing a custom action filter to do this, but it seems so obvious that I can't believe it's not supported out of the box.

Answer 1

use you own custom model binder which implements IModelBinder

Answer 2

If you use named parameters on the URL, you can specify a specific name for the parameter into your controller method, like so:

http://mydomain.com/mycontroller/getwidget?parentid=1&level=2

...and you won't have to match routes on the parameters.