Question

I am trying to add support for different languages to existing MVC 3 application. So far my links were

oldUrl -> myapp.com/Item/Details/5/some-title

And there are links to the website from different places on the web. But now I want to change the URL so the language is included:

newUrl -> kmyapp.com/en/Item/Details/5/some-title

However I want the oldUrl links to be valid. And the question is how do I do this… The easiest way would be to add another route, but I already have too many of them and it is getting kind of ugly, and when I create urls from a page that doesn’t have the language the links also don’t have the language so I have to do something else then.

Another way would be to override something that stands just before MVC tries to map the request to a specific route, but has already parsed the request url and filled the routeValues dictionary. So I can just check for the language and if it is not included in the route parameters I can add it on my own and call the implementation of the parent class to continue. Is that possible? What should I look at – UrlRoutingModule, MvcHttpHandler or something else? What can I override and how to tell MVC to use my version?

Any other ideas would be also appreciated!

Answer 1

Another way would be to override something that stands just before MVC tries to map the request to a specific route, but has already parsed the request url and filled the routeValues dictionary. So I can just check for the language and if it is not included in the route parameters I can add it on my own and call the implementation of the parent class to continue. Is that possible?

Yes It is possible.

You can Override GetRouteData in RouteBase which will have URL details in it.

public override RouteData GetRouteData(HttpContextBase httpContext)
{
        string url = httpContext.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath;
}

and in global.aspx add below code.

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

    routes.Add(new MyUrlRoute()); // Add before your default Routes

    routes.MapRoute(
        "Default", // Route name
        "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
    );

For more detailed implementation – refer blog
url-manipulation-implementing-routebase.html