Question

I searched around for my problem, but could not find a solution…

I have a BlogController, and I want to match the following routes to a separate action:

/blog/
/blog/rss
/blog/tags/tagName

However, I want to match any other url’s, like:

/blog/my-post
/blog/other-post

to the Post action.

I tried with

routes.MapRoute("Blog",
"blog/{action}/{param}",
new { controller = "Blog", action = "Index", param = UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute("BlogPost",
"blog/{slug}",
new { controller = "Blog", action = "post" });

but the second route is never matched.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

The first route allready match any urls in the form of blog/slug.

Whe resolving routes, ASP.NET MVC will try use the first match, and even if there is no action to get that method. ASP.NET MVC’s routing still won’t try the next route.

So with your routes, the url blog/my-first-article will match the first url and MVC will look for the my-first-action method on the BlogController class.

Solution 1

You could either define seperate routes for each method, like this:

routes.MapRoute("Blog index",
    "blog",
    new { controller = "Blog", action = "Index" });

routes.MapRoute("Blog RSS feed",
    "blog/rss",
    new { controller = "Blog", action = "Rss" });

routes.MapRoute("Posts by tag",
    "blog/Tags/{params}",
    new { controller = "Blog", action = "Tags" });

routes.MapRoute("BlogPost",
    "blog/{slug}",
    new { controller = "Blog", action = "post" });

Solution 2

You could use a constraint to define valid values for {action} in the first route.

routes.MapRoute("Blog",
    "blog/{action}/{param}",
    new { controller = "Blog", action = "Index", param = UrlParameter.Optional },
    new { action = 'index|rss|tags' });

routes.MapRoute("BlogPost",
    "blog/{slug}",
    new { controller = "Blog", action = "post" });

The constraint is in form of a regex.