Question

I have an MVC website which used to use URLs in the standard format of: Controller/Action.

Recently, I have changed it to: Site/Controller/Action.

The problem is, there are several links to my site out there which follow the old format, and I want to redirect them accordingly.

for example: mydomain.com/Home/CustomerSearch now should go to mydomain.com/Online/Home/CustomerSearch

whereas: mydomain.com/AffiliatesHome/CustomerSearch now should go to mydomain.com/Affiliate/AffiliatesHome/CustomerSearch

How can I get it to handle the redirecting by putting in the extra routing, depending on the link they came in by?

The current routing I am using is:

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

Answer 1

Since I do not really see an schema in your old to new URL mapping I would suggest to add routes that match the old Controller/Action Schema and map them to the new Site/Controller/Action route schema.

So you could add the following routes

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

routes.MapRoute(
  "LegacyAffiliates", 
  "AffiliatesHome/{action}/{id}", 
  new { site="Affiliate", controller = "AffiliatesHome", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } 
);

From an SEO standpoint this is not ideal because you have different URLs for the same page. A permanent redirect via status code 301 and the new URL passed in the location is better suited.

You could build a redirect controller and use the legacy routes to map legacy URLs to the redirect controller somehow like this

routes.MapRoute(
           "LegacyHome",
           "Home/{newAction}/{id}",
           new { controller = "Redirect", action = "Redirect", newSite = "Online", newController="Home", newAction = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
        );

Code of the redirect controller

    public class RedirectController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Redirect(string newSite, string newController, string newAction)
    {
        var routeValues = new RouteValueDictionary(
            new
                {
                    site = newSite,
                    controller = newController,
                    action = newAction
                });

        if (RouteData.Values["id"] != null)
        {
            routeValues.Add("id", RouteData.Values["id"]);
        }

        return RedirectToRoutePermanent(routeValues);
    }
}