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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T16:23:48+00:00

I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 application where users can post suggestions along the

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I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 application where users can post suggestions along the lines of “bla bla would be better if yada yada yada”.
For the suggestion detail page I have defined a nice SEO friendly route as follows:

routes.MapRoute(null, "suggestion/{id}/{it}/would-be-better-if-{if}", 
    new { controller = "suggestion", action = "details" });

As you can see I want the “would be better if” part to be fixed.

This route works perfectly for any old suggestion and generates links like suggestion/5/this-site/would-be-better-if-it-had-a-iphone-application, and clicking on the link actually requests the appropriate detail page.

A friend of mine, who ironically happens to be a tester, has managed to, involuntarily, post a suggestion that actually breaks the route: “This site would be better if ‘would be better if’ was always aligned in the middle“.
The link generated for this suggestion is
/suggestion/84/this-site/would-be-better-if-would-be-better-if-was-always-alligned-in-the-middle.

I have tried Phil Haack’s Routing Debugger and have confirmed that the route will actually work up until suggestion/84/this-site/would-be-better-if-would-be-better-if-, so the second “would-be-better-if” is actually accepted; adding anything after that will actually cause the url not to match any route (thanks to Omar -see comments- for help).

Please bear in mind that I really don’t want to change the route definition since I think it is as good as I can manage for this case, SEO-wise.

So, how come having text equal to the fixed part of the route prevents the link from matching the route? why is the route breaking?

I am actually rahter more interested in the why, as I believe understanding the why will lead to a solution or at least a proper understanding of a rather interesting problem.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This looks like a dupe of ASP.NET routing: Literal sub-segment between tokens, and route values with a character from the literal sub-segment which is a much simpler version of the bug. I’d recommend closing this one in favor of that one.

    I answered that question.

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