Question

I have a web site written in ASP.NET MVC 4.5
I have a controller called Products with views about each product.

I want with one of our products that when a user goes to http://www.website.com/ProductName redirects to http://www.website.com/Products/ProductName.

I am thinking right now this two approaches:

• Create a Controller called like ProductName and use RedirectToRoute()
• Modify the RouteConfig.cs file and add one.

What is your the best approach and why? Is there another?

Answer 1

I’m with @rjovic, definitely go with the second approach and add a new route.

The first approach would require creating a new controller for every product, which seems to go against good design principles; why have a separate class for multiple products that behave the same way? Routes are designed for exactly this kind of scenario: mapping a user-friendly URL scheme to the appropriate handlers in your application logic.

There are two possible approaches to designing the route in this case:

1. Match any URLs like /{ProductName}. The problem is this is a greedy scheme, so you’d want to put this near the end of the route lists, so that it would only be used in case no other schemes are matched.
2. Match only the URLs like /{ProductName} that match an actual product. So you’d have to pre-load the list of product names, and construct a constraint that would look like (for example) “[product1|product2|product3]”.