Question

I just realized MVC 3 and 4 Routing can configure the path to the actions which are a part of an area without naming the area name but they don’t return views. for example see the following code :

namespace APS.EIMS.UI.Areas.Admin
{
    public class TestController : BaseController
    {

        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            return View();
        }

        public JsonResult GetNames()
        {
            var dc = GetDataContext();
            var result = from m in dc.Db<IMS_Reject>()
                         select new { m.Id };
            return Json(result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
        }

    }
}

whenever I try the //localhost/Test/Index It can not find the Index view but can route the path to the action in the area (it works fine for //localhost/admin/test/index as I expect). I also get the same result for //localhost/admin/test/getnames and //localhost/test/getnames.
why does it act in this way? how can it find the action without the area name? I need to prevent this in my application which I’m developing, is it possible?(I mean route only when the address is complete and 404 error otherwise)

Answer 1

You will probably have a route like the default one:

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

So a URL like //localhost/Test/Index will be matched against that default route and as you can see, it will correctly find the controller but not the views. By default the controller factory will look for any Controller class in the application with the requested name, no matter where it is located.

You can prevent this if you explicitly set the namespaces in the default route and tell MVC not to look for controllers in other namespaces.

This is done by using the MapRoute overload that takes a string array with the namespaces and explicitly disabling namespace fallback for that route. (Without disabling namespace fallback you would be just prioritizing those namespaces in case multiple controllers with the same name are found).

This could look like this (I have set a single namespace but you could set as many as you need):

Route route = routes.MapRoute(
    "Default", 
    "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    new[] { "APS.EIMS.UI.WhateverInNoArea" }
);
route.DataTokens["UseNamespaceFallback"] = false;