Question

i’m new to ASP.NET MVC and i’m facing some structural design problems.

I can’t figure out how to setup routing.

I want the following:

http://website/                          > HomeController     Action=Index

Public:
http://website/{controller}              > SectionController  Action=Index
http://website/products/id               > ProductsController Action=Details
http://website/products/category/id      > ProductsController Action=ListByCatId
http://website/products/categories/      > ProductsController Action=ListCategories
http://website/products/categories/id    > ProductsController Action=DetailsCategories

Admin:
http://website/admin/                    > AdminController    Action=Index
http://website/admin/{controller}        > SectionController  Action=Index

The default mapRoute is fine for most of the parts:

routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}", _
                New With {.controller = "Home", .action = "Index", .id = ""})

When I start putting ‘category’ instead of the id of the product the problems start…
Should I ‘hardcode’ the routeUrls, e.g. “products/category/{id}”?

For the Admin part:
I’d like to put all controllers belonging to the Admin section of the website in: /Controllers/Admin/XxxController.vb. Is it possible to Namespace them and let them have the same name as in the public section? e.q.
– Website.ProductsController class for public parts and
– Website.Admin.ProductsController for the Admin section? How should I setup this?

Answer 1

This is how I would do it :

routes.MapRoute("ProductDetail", "Products/{id}", _
    New With {.controller = "Products", .action = "Details", .id = ""},
    New With {.id = @"\d+"})
    //constraint, so this route will not catch a category name
    //or the URL below

routes.MapRoute("ProductList", "Products/category/{id}", _
    New With {.controller = "Products", .action = "ListByCatId", .id = ""})

routes.MapRoute("Category", "Products/categories/{id}", _
    New With {.controller = "Products", .action= "ListCategories", .id = ""})
    //for the route above, let it fall to the ListCategories action
    //and in that action take a nullable of int as a parameter.
    //if the id parameter has a value, 
    //    return DetailsCategories(id)
    //else list the categories.


routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}", _
    New With {.controller = "Home", .action = "Index", .id = ""})

As for having two controllers with the same name, yes, you can do it with having different namespaces and specifying them in the mapRoute method. There’s an overload that takes string[] namespaces. Just make sure you specify the namespaces for the controllers with the same name while routing.