Question

I’m trying to create a route that redirects to urls but can’t get it to work for the life of me. Here’s what I have so far:

public class GoAreaRegistration : AreaRegistration
{
    public override string AreaName
    {
        get
        {
            return "Go";
        }
    }

    public override void RegisterArea( AreaRegistrationContext context )
    {
        context.MapRoute(
            "Go/Issues",
            "go/issues/{issueID}",
            new { controller = "Go", action = "GoIssues" },
            new { issueID = @"\d+" }
        );
    }
}

and my controller:

public class GoController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult GoIssues( int issueID )
    {
      var version = getVersion( issueID );
      if( version != null )
      {
        string url = MakeUrl(version, issueID);

        // Redirect to the right url
        return Redirect( url );
      }
    }

    // not found
    return HttpNotFound();
  }
}

The whole point of this is to determine the right version to redirect to and to redirect there. But for some reason go/issues/123 gives me a 404 not found. I used the route debug tool and it shows that this route is hit but when I disable it, I’m back to 404.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

If anybody else is having the same problem, I’ve found the answer.

After much googling, I found the following article that explains how routing works.

http://blog.davebouwman.com/2011/12/08/asp-net-mvc3-and-404s-for-area-controllers/

The article says that ASP.NET is expecting the namespace to be a certain format:

The issue was the namespace on my controller. Turns out that MVC has a convention that the area name is expected to be in the namespace of the controller.

So – I had StatsMe.API.CategoriesController, but MVC was looking for StatsMe.Areas.API.CategoriesController.

What finally tipped me off was some stuff in the RouteDebugger output…

Annoying because the error message really could have helped out by saying “Hey – I’m looking for StatsMe.Areas.API.CategoriesController and I can’t find it”, rather than the very generic message it spit out.