Question

I have a controller class Movie. One of its action method is given as follows:

    public string ActionMethod(string id)
    {

        if (id == null)
        {

            return "null";
        }

        if (id == string.Empty)
        {

            return "empty";
        }

        return "neither null nor empaty";
    }

Is it possible to pass an empty string to an action method with a routed URL segment rather than a query string?

Note that http://localhost:21068/Movies/ActionMethod?id= can do that but it uses a query string. In addition, it is not allowed to modify the action method. 🙂

Answer 1

I’m not clear about what you’re trying to achieve, but you can probably do it by specifying routes appropriately in Global.asax.cs. As a contrived example, the following:

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

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

lets you use:

http://localhost:21068/Movies/ActionMethod        - id is null
http://localhost:21068/Movies/ActionMethod/id/    - id is an empty string
http://localhost:21068/Movies/ActionMethod/id/123 - id is a nonempty string

If you state what URLs you want to allow and how to map them, someone will no doubt suggest how you can set up your routes.