Question

I have been trying to learn ASP.NET MVC 3 and things are going well apart from the routing aspect, whatever I try I just can’t seem to get them quite right.

I have an ActionLink on the main page:

@Html.ActionLink("Contracts", "List", "Contract", 
                 new { User.Identity.Name, page=1 })

Which is meant to access this method in the ContractController:

public ViewResult List(string user, int page = 1)
{
    //snip
}

My routes are:

 routes.MapRoute(
     null, 
     "Page{page}",
     new { Controller = "Contract", action = "List" }
 );

 routes.MapRoute(
     null,
     "Page{page}",
     new { Controller = "Contract", action = "List", user = "", page = 1 }
 );

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

The link now will return a 404 error as it can’t find the action ‘List’ in the controller ‘Home’, which obviously means it didn’t use either of the first routes.

Everything worked before I tried to add parameters to the ActionLink, so basically, what am I doing wrong?

Thanks very much.

Answer 1

Alex,

You’re doing all the other bits absolutely correctly, however the actionlink has a missing parameter, try this for your actionlink:

@Html.ActionLink("Contracts", "List", "Contract", 
             new { User.Identity.Name, page = 1 }, null)

Adding the null as the final param (htmlAttributes) is all that’s missing for you in this scenario (there are 9 overloads for Html.ActionLink, so it’s VERY easy to miss the correct implementation).