Question

I would like to use a route with the action in the querystring

http://server/path/controller?action=save

so I can use relative urls on the client-side

Is there an easy way to achieve this?

Answer 1

The solution that @Darin provided, is good and useful enough, but there is an issue with actions that not supplied by Html.ActionLink such as Index actions that will cause an error like this:

The RouteData must contain an item named ‘action’ with a non-empty
string value.

So you have to change the MyRoute to this one:

public class MyRoute : Route {

    public MyRoute(string url, object defaults)
        : base(url, new RouteValueDictionary(defaults), new MvcRouteHandler()) { }

    public override RouteData GetRouteData(HttpContextBase httpContext) {

        var routeData = base.GetRouteData(httpContext);
        var action = httpContext.Request["action"];
        if (routeData != null && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(action)) {
            routeData .Values["action"] = action;
        } 

        // you have to add something like this:
        else {      
            routeData .Values["action"] = "Index";
        }
        return routeData;
    }

}