Question

I am trying to create a route with a Username…

So the URL would be mydomain.com/abrudtkhul (abrudtkhul being the username)

My application will have public profiles based on usernames (Ex: http://delicious.com/abrudtkuhl). I want to replicate this URL scheme.

How can I structure this in ASP.Net MVC? I am using Membership/Roles Providers too.

Answer 1

Here’s what you want to do, first define your route map:

routes.MapRoute(              'Users',               '{username}',                new { controller = 'User', action='index', username=''}); 

What this allows you to do is to setup the following convention:

• Controller: User (the UserController type)
• Action: Index (this is mapped to the Index method of UserController)
• Username: This is the parameter for the Index method

So when you request the url http://mydomain.com/javier this will be translated to the call for UserController.Index(string username) where username is set to the value of javier.

Now since you’re planning on using the MembershipProvider classes, you want to something more like this:

 public ActionResult Index(MembershipUser usr)  {     ViewData['Welcome'] = 'Viewing ' + usr.UserName;      return View();  } 

In order to do this, you will need to use a ModelBinder to do the work of, well, binding from a username to a MembershipUser type. To do this, you will need to create your own ModelBinder type and apply it to the user parameter of the Index method. Your class can look something like this:

public class UserBinder : IModelBinder {    public ModelBinderResult BindModel(ModelBindingContext bindingContext)    {       var request = bindingContext.HttpContext.Request;       var username = request['username'];       MembershipUser user = Membership.GetUser(username);        return new ModelBinderResult(user);    } } 

This allows you to change the declaration of the Index method to be:

public ActionResult Index([ModelBinder(typeof(UserBinder))]      MembershipUser usr) {     ViewData['Welcome'] = 'Viewing ' + usr.Username;     return View(); } 

As you can see, we’ve applied the [ModelBinder(typeof(UserBinder))] attribute to the method’s parameter. This means that before your method is called the logic of your UserBinder type will be called so by the time the method gets called you will have a valid instance of your MembershipUser type.