Question

Being rather new to ASP.MVC I’m looking for a solution to the following routing problem.

I want these Url’s to lead to the shown pages:

/Member/123/A+Strange+Username -> page with members details
/Member/123 -> as above
/Member/Connections/123 -> page with list of members connections
/Member/Connections/123/A+Strange+Username -> as above
/Member/Comments/123 -> page with list of members comments
/Member/Comments/123/A+Strange+Username -> as above

The username should be ignored but will be appended to links to help search engines.

I have tried with the following routes:

routes.MapRoute("MemberPage", "Member/{id}/{*name}", new { controller = "Member", action = "Details", id = "" });
routes.MapRoute("MemberAction", "Member/{action}/{id}/{*name}", new { controller = "Member", action = "Details", id = "" });

But it seems it always defaults to the first route, and then gets an error since “Connections” or “Comments” is invalid id’s for the Details controller.

Is there a way to switch route depending on the type of the id-value, or another way to solve this?

Answer 1

It might help if you add a route constraint to the {id} both routes.

routes.MapRoute("MemberPage", "Member/{id}/{*name}",
      new { controller = "Member", action = "Details", id = "" },
      new { id=@"\d+" });
routes.MapRoute("MemberAction", "Member/{action}/{id}/{*name}",
      new { controller = "Member", action = "Details", id = "" },
      new { id=@"\d+" });

This way, it won’t try to map “Comments” to {id} in the first route and will fall through to the second one which should work fine with that URL.