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Asked: 2026-05-16T00:28:14+00:00

I am working with ASP.NET MVC 2 and would like to optimize my routing.

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I am working with ASP.NET MVC 2 and would like to optimize my routing. The desired result is as follows:

http://www.url.com/Sites/
http://www.url.com/Sites/Search/NY001
http://www.url.com/Sites/NY001
http://www.url.com/Sites/NY001/Photos

The problem with this scenario is that I want to treat the URL bits differently depending on their content, in a sense. As one can imagine, “NY001” is the identifier for a specific site, not for an action that lives in the Sites controller. My current solution is to define a special route map for the site-specific URLs and to specify each action in the Sites controller separately before that. 

// currently in place, works
routes.MapRoute("SiteList", "Sites", new { controller = "Sites", action = "Index" });
routes.MapRoute("SiteSearch", "Sites/Search/{searchString}", new { controller = "Sites", action = "Index", searchString = "" });
routes.MapRoute("SiteNotFound", "Sites/NotFound", new { controller = "Sites", action = "NotFound" });
// and so on...

routes.MapRoute("Site", "Sites/{siteId}/{action}", new { controller = "Sites", action = "Index", siteId = "" });

As this is one of the central components of my web application, these actions are growing daily and the list is getting a bit unwieldy. I would love to be able to distill the long list of action-specific routes to a single declaration, similar to this:

routes.MapRoute("Sites", "Sites/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Sites", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });

The problem is that the routing framework has no way of differentiating between this new route and the site-specific one in the above example; therefore, both are matches. Am I stuck with declaring each action separately? Should I consider using a regular expression to differentiate based on the URLs’ content?

Thanks in advance and I apologize in advance if this question has already been asked in a different form.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Not sure what exactly you want to accomplish. Of course you can’t really map URLs with different signatures with one route, but you can reduce the list like this:

    routes.MapRoute("Site", "Sites/{siteId}/{action}", new { controller = "Sites", action = "Index" }, new { action = "(?:Index|Photos|News)", siteId = @"[A-Z0-9]+" });

    for urls:

    http://www.url.com/Sites/NY001
http://www.url.com/Sites/NY001/Photos
http://www.url.com/Sites/NY001/News

    This route will only map to actions Index, Photos, News (and whatever else you put in that reg. expression).

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