Question

I’m working on a project converting older .aspx pages to newer MVC pages. I’m currently using the routing function to map the existing legacy pages to use the newer MVC pages behind the scenes. This is working great because it is preserving the existing URL, however, whenever the controller needs to redirect the user OR an MVC Url.Action link is used, the URL it sends the user to is the MVC url and not the routed legacy page url. I realize that this is how its suppose to be functioning out of the box but I was wondering if MVC has “reverse routing” functionality of some sort. By reverse routing I am looking for something that allows the Url.Action(“action”) to return the routed .aspx associated url with the specified action instead of the default /controller/action link.

So for instance,

here is a sample route

context.MapRoute("AboutUs", "pages/aboutus.aspx", new { controller = "default", action = "aboutus" });

This enables domain.com/pages/aboutus.aspx to run the new MVC action “aboutus” from the DefaultController behind the scenes perfectly.

However, if on another MVC page I have a link created by

Url.Action("aboutus")

it points them to domain.com/mvc/aboutus. I would like it to point them to domain.com/pages/aboutus.aspx to keep uniformity across the site.

Thanks for any insights that you can provide. I might end up having to override the Url.Action method to look up the route and return the mapped url but I just wanted to check for existing functionality so I don’t reinvent the wheel.

Answer 1

Try using the RouteUrl extension method, which matches the route by route name rather than route parameters, like so:

Url.RouteUrl("aboutus") // route name

MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd460347