Question

I am working on a site where the user is going to add pages to the site, and I was trying to use routing to immediately have the page available after creation.

For example, the user may create an About page, and right now I put some logic in the controller when the page is added.

if (ModelState.IsValid)
        {
            context.Pages.Add(page);
            context.SaveChanges();
            RouteTable.Routes.MapRoute(page.Name, page.Url,
                            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });

            return RedirectToAction("Index");  
        }

But when I create the About page with About as the url and then try to go to /About, I get a 404 error.

Is it possible to add routes outside of the Application_Start?

Answer 1

You should avoid defining any routes in controller actions. For your scenario you could define the following route:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Default",
    "{id}",
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" }
);

Now a request of the form /About will be routed to the Index action of the Home controller and passed id=About as argument:

public ActionResult Index(string id)
{
    // if the request was /About, id will equal to About here
    ...
}