How to pass ObjectId from MongoDB in MVC.net

Question

I'm starting a new project with Mongo, NoRM and MVC .Net.

Before I was using FluentNHibernate so my IDs were integer, now my IDs are ObjectId. So when I have an Edit link my URL looks like this :

WebSite/Admin/Edit/23,111,160,3,240,200,191,56,25,0,0,0

And it does not bind automaticly to my controller as an ObjectId

Do you have any suggestions/best practices to work with this? Do I need to encode/decode the ID everytime?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I am not familiar with the ObjectId type but you could write a custom model binder that will take care of converting the id route constraint to an instance of ObjectId.

Answer 2

Did you know you can use the [MongoIdentifier] attribute to make any property act as the unique key?

I've been solving this issue by borrowing a technique from WordPress by having every entity also be represented by a "url slug" property and decorating that property with [MongoIdentifier].

So if I had a person named Johnny Walker I'd create a slug of "johnny-walker". You just have to make sure these url slugs stay unique and you get to keep clean urls without ugly object ids.

Answer 3

I Use following

public class ObjectIdModelBinder : DefaultModelBinder
{
    public override object BindModel(ControllerContext controllerContext, ModelBindingContext bindingContext)
    {
        string value = controllerContext.RouteData.Values[bindingContext.ModelName] as string;
        if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(value)) {
            return ObjectId.Empty;
        }
        return new ObjectId(value);
    }
}

and

protected void Application_Start()
    {
        ......

        ModelBinders.Binders.Add(typeof(ObjectId), new ObjectIdModelBinder()); 
    }

almost forgot, make URLs from ObjectId.ToString()