Question

I am working on an application surrounding sporting events. There are different types of events like a soccer tournament and a tennis tournament. Based on the type of tournament I want to have the requests proccessed by a different area. But the events and their tournament type is something that is configurable by users of the application and stored in the database.

Currrently I have this proof of concept:

public class SoccerTournamentAreaRegistration : AreaRegistration
{
    public override string AreaName
    {
        get
        {
            return "SoccerTournament";
        }
    }

    public override void RegisterArea(AreaRegistrationContext context)
    {
        var soccerTournaments = new string[] { "championsleague", "worldcup" };
        foreach (var tournament in soccerTournaments)
        {
            context.MapRoute(
                string.Format("SoccerTournament_default{0}", tournament),
                string.Format("{0}/{{controller}}/{{action}}/{{id}}", tournament),
                new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
                new[] { "Mvc3AreaTest1.Areas.SoccerTournament.Controllers" }
                );
        }
    }
}

and it works only I want soccerTournaments to come from the database (not a problem) but I also want it to work ask soon as a new event/tournament type record is added to the database and that doesn’t work in this case.

How can I make the area selection dynamic instead of hard coded into routes?

Answer 1

Area registration only occurs at the application start, so any tournaments added after startup will not be captured until a re-start.

To have a dynamic routing scheme for your tournaments, you must redefine your area route and add a RouteConstraint.

Redefine your route as follows:

public override void RegisterArea(AreaRegistrationContext context)
{
    context.MapRoute(
        "SoccerTournament_default",
        "{tournament}/{controller}/{action}/{id}", 
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
        new { tournament = new MustBeTournamentName() },
        new string[] { "Mvc3AreaTest1.Areas.SoccerTournament.Controllers" }
    );
}

Than, you can create the MustBeTournamentName RouteConstraint to be similar to the RouteConstraint in the answer to this question: Asp.Net Custom Routing and custom routing and add category before controller