Question

I’m so obsessed with semantics and I’d like to create meaningful sentences through ASP.NET MVC’s route rules which semantically describe the action. For example, I want to assign an article to some categories, and to do that, I’d like to have these URLs:

/assign/article-name/to-categories

which should have this rule:

assign/{articleName}/to-categories

and

/assign/article-name/to/category-title/category

which should have this rule:

assign/{articleName}/to/{categoryTitle}/category.

Some examples of desired URLs are:

assign/seo/to/computer/category, or assign/how-to-drive-fast/to/general-knowledge/category, or URLs like that.

The problem is that, I’m not professional at MVC routing and I can’t make this work. Any help please!

Answer 1

The following route definition should work:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Assign",
    "assign/{articleName}/to/{categoryTitle}/category",
    new { controller = "Articles", action = "Assign" }
);

where you would have an ArticlesController:

public class ArticlesController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Assign(string articleName, string categoryTitle)
    {
        // TODO: handle the assigning
        return Content(string.Format("{0} {1}", articleName, categoryTitle), "text/html");
    }
}

Now for example the following request assign/seo/to/computer/category will be routed to the Assign action which will be passed articleName = seo and categoryTitle = computer.