Question

I’m working on a project to rewrite an aspx site as MVC3. I want to make the old URLs work on the new site. I have named my controllers and actions such that the URLs actually contain enough info in the query string to route correctly but I’m having trouble getting the routing to work since it doesn’t like the ? in the URL.

Basically I have old URLs like this:

www.example.com/Something/SomethingElse/MyPage.aspx?Section=DetailSection&TaskId=abcdef

I tried to create a route using:

routes.MapRoute(
    "OldSite",
    "Something/SomethingElse/MyPage.aspx?Section={action}Section&Id={id}", 
    new { controller = "Task", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);

I want it to route to the correct new URL which is:

www.example.com/Task/Detail/abcdef

I know that all traffic to the MyPage.aspx page should go to my new Task controller and the beginning of the Section parameter always matches one of a few corresponding actions on that controller.

Unfortunately I have found that I get an error that a route can’t contain a question marks. How should I handle this? Would it be better to use URL rewriting? Because this is a private site I’m not concerned with returning permanent redirects or anything – no search engine will have links to the site anyway. I just want to make sure that customers that have a URL in an old email will get to the right page in the new site.

Answer 1

In this one case I think the simplest way would be to have your old page mapped to a route:

routes.MapRoute(
    "MyPage",
    "Something/SomethingElse/MyPage.aspx", 
    new { controller = "Task", action = "MyPageHandler" }
);

And have this route mapped to an action method in TaskController:

public ActionResult MyPageHandler(string section, string taskId)
{
    if (section.Contains("Detail"))
    {
        // execute section
    }
}

This way you’re treating your old site’s query string for what it is: a query string. Passing those parameters straight into an action method is the most MVC-y way to interpret your old site.