Question

I am using ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta with Web API – although I believe the routing implementation has no significant differences from .NET 4.0 relevant to this question. MapHttpRoute, used in the code below, ships with MVC 4 and is an extension method that essentially performs the same function as MapRoute, but for WebApi controllers.

I have a legacy web serivce method for which I want create an ASP.NET route. The method currently has following signature:

NewsItemList ListNewsItems(string category, int maxResults)

It should be mapped by requests whose URIs look like this:

~/news?category=finance&maxResults=50

Neither, either or both query string parameters can be present.

I am struggling to find a way to define a route to support this method.

I used MapHttpRoute to register the route and set defaults for the controller and action values to the controller and method appropriately. Here are some templates I have tried with the outcome:

• "news" captures "~/news" and binds to the method correctly, but
  won’t capture anything with a querystring.
• "news{*query} is not
  allowed because you cannot have a catch-all unless it is exclusive to
  the Uri segment
• "news{query}" captures the query string but doesn’t
  bind to the method

I’m looking for a way forwards that isn’t too radical a departure as this is an edge-case in the application. The solution has to fit in with many other existing routes. Ideally I’d like to avoid going down the Uri re-writer path as well.

Answer 1

This was down to a problem in the way I was testing. I erroneously assumed that HttpRequestBase.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath includes the query string part of the request uri. It does not. When I corrected my Mock, everything started working.