Asp.Net MVC: How do I enable dashes in my urls?

Question

I'd like to have dashes separate words in my URLs. So instead of:

/MyController/MyAction

I'd like:

/My-Controller/My-Action

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Don't do it. A dash a URL is represented as %2D (just like a space is %20).

Answer 2

You could write a custom route that derives from the Route class GetRouteData to strip dashes, but when you call the APIs to generate a URL, you'll have to remember to include the dashes for action name and controller name.

That shouldn't be too hard.

Answer 3

Plenty of websites successfully use hyphens (or dashes or whatever--the key next to my 0) in URLs without any encoding happening. Hyphens are more SEO-friendly than underscores, as well, as Google (and other engines) reads hyphen-delimited strings as multiple terms, whereas underscore-delimited strings are interpreted as a single term.

Answer 4

You can use the ActionName attribute like so:

[ActionName("My-Action")]
public ActionResult MyAction() {
    return View();
}

Not sure if you can do something similar for controllers.

Answer 5

You could create a custom route handler as shown in this blog:

http://blog.zero7web.com/2010/02/how-to-allow-hyphens-in-urls-using-asp-net-mvc-2/

public class HyphenatedRouteHandler : MvcRouteHandler{
        protected override IHttpHandler  GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
        {
            requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"] = requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString().Replace("-", "_");
            requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"] = requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString().Replace("-", "_");
            return base.GetHttpHandler(requestContext);
        }
    }

...and the new route:

routes.Add(
            new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", 
                new RouteValueDictionary(
                    new { controller = "Default", action = "Index", id = "" }),
                    new HyphenatedRouteHandler())
        );

A very similar question was asked here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2070890/asp-net-mvc-support-for-urls-with-hyphens