Question

I have been doing ASP.NET for a while, and have done very little in MVC (in general), but very new at the ASP.NET MVC framework, as well as the correct terminology on a few things.

Here is my example (actual application I am working on is different, but this is a public example I can use) – I want to create a simpler version of Redmine, but in .net.

I want to list issues, in such a way that if I go to example.org/issues, I see a list of all issues (similar to http://www.redmine.org/issues), across all projects.

But if I go to the project, as in example.org/project/issues, I see just the issues for that project (similar to http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/issues). This would be the same for example.org/project2/issues, etc.

What is the correct term for this? I would assume that the developers didn’t rewrite the ‘issues’ code in two places, that they reused this code.

Since I don’t know the fully correct term for this, it is hard to find good examples in the ASP.NET MVC world that I can start with. So the second part of this, is what would be an example that I could look at in ASP.NET MVC, and how should this look in Visual Studio to me?

There would also be several other things under /project/, like settings, details, logs, etc, similar on how one would navigate http://www.redmine.org/projects/redmine/.

Finally, what if projects was not on the top level? As in, what if my application was more like:

example.org/
example.org/projects/
example.org/projects/project1
example.org/projects/project1/issues
example.org/projects/project2
example.org/dashboard/

Answer 1

Set up one controller called whatever you’d like (I’ll use RedMineController).

In that controller you’ll have a single action method named ListIssues. Accept a parameter named ProjectName:

public ActionResult ListIssues(string projectName) {}

Lastly create two routes in your global.asax.cs:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Issues Root",
    "issues",
    new { controller = "RedMine", action = "ListIssues" }
);

routes.MapRoute(
    "Project Issues",
    "projects/{projectName}/issues",
    new { controller = "RedMine", action = "ListIssues" }
);

In your ListIssues action, check if projectName == null, and if so get all issues, otherwise get specific ones. The first route will pass null, the second will pass what is in the URL. Don’t forget to throw a 404 if the project name in the URL is invalid.

Hope this helps!