Question

I’d like to have an Index action for a “Users” controller that takes an optional parameter.

/Users/{id}

Or

/Users

I’d like to avoid:

/Users/Index/{id}

Or

/Users/Index/

I added a Route to map /Users/{id} to the Index action.

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

That works fine. I ran into a problem when I added another action, “Add”, also with an optional parameter, to the Users controller. The route I added earlier misinterprets Add as a parameter to the Index action. The “Index” action gets triggered for /Users/Add.

How can I get the best of both?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Set the constraints property to only allow numbers. That should fix your routing issue.

routes.MapRoute( "Users",
    "Users/{id}",
    new { controller = "Users", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
    new { id = "[0-9]+" }
);

Edit.

You can do it differently without using a regex constraint. Add the route Users/Add explicitly, adding it before the Index route:

routes.MapRoute( "Users",
    "Users/Add/{id}",
    new { controller = "Users", action = "Add", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);