Question

I’m using the ASP.NET MVC3 sample project and would like to have new links added to the page that go directly to the root url
So instead of mydomain.com/Home/About it would do mydomain/About.

This page suggests adding a new route. http://weblogs.asp.net/gunnarpeipman/archive/2011/04/17/asp-net-mvc-defining-short-urls-for-root-level-pages.aspx

Is there another way? Say I have 5 pages that will be on the root do I have to add a special route for each one?

Answer 1

Under the assumption that you are looking to do a bunch of single path requests/respones, and not just redirect home controller actions, then this is an option.

The link you provide is one way to do that. The other is to create 5 controllers using the default route. I’m not sure if I would suggest either is better (due to a lack of what your 5 paths actually are), but they both produce the same out come. If your default route looks like:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Default", // Route name
    "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
    new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", 
          id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
); 

It’s basically stating that the default controller is home and the default action is index. These values are not mutually inclusive, meaning that neither required the other in order to be a default value.

Thus you could do:

website.com/about with

public AboutController
{
  public ActionResult index()
  {
    return this.View();
  }
}

and/or website.com/people with

public PeopleController
{
  public ActionResult index()
  {
    return this.View();
  }
}