Question

I have a request controller that is getting out of hand, and I want to divide the actions on several controllers while maintaining a clean URL. I’m trying to experiment with routing, but without success. I’ve read some examples and tutorials on routing, but, though I understand the examples, nothing seems to apply to my case, and I feel non the wiser. What I want is for the URL Requests/Approval to be handled on my ApprovalController instead of my RequestController, so I wrote the following.

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Default", // Route name
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
        );

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

    }

But it’s not working. Why? I have a folder in the my Views called Approval, and in there I have a file called Index.cshtml. How should I code the MapRoute?

Edit

I added all the routes I’ve got

Answer 1

You need to swap the two MapRoute statements, like so:

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

routes.MapRoute(
    "Default", // Route name
    "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
);

The reason it is currently not working is because the first statement (‘Default’ route name) is getting matched before the second one is even evaluated.

In addition (as noted in my above example,) you need to remove ‘{controller}’ in the Approval route and replace with ‘Approval’… unless you specifically want the URL /Request/{ANY controller}/{action} to go through, which I doubt. From your question it seems you only want /Request/Approval/ to go to your Approval controller.

Don’t forget to keep the Default route at the bottom, so as to match your other controllers and actions. It serves as a catch-all should no other matches exist.