Question

I’m working on converting a website with a 4-level directory structure to MVC3 in Visual Studio 2010. The examples that I’ve found have routes with {controller}/{action}/{id}.

Thinking about directory structure levels as sections, what I need to do is handle a structure that looks like this:
mysite.com/{section1}/{section2}/{section3}/{section4}

An index file will be at each section, operating as in introduction to the section and a directory. I don’t anticipate any web pages beyond the section-4 level at this time.

My preference would be to use an XML sitemap, and to write some block of code to handle the various page directory structures from that sitemap. I’ve done this successfully with WebForms, but really want to do this with MVC3. The big piece I’m missing is a good working example of doing this.

Right now I can’t even get this to route to Section2. This is in my Global.asax.

    public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

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

        routes.MapRoute("",
            "Section1/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            new { controller = "Section1", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
        );
    }

This is in my Section1 controller.

public class Section1Controller : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View();
    }

    public ActionResult Section2(string id)
    {
        return View("Section2/" + id);
    }
}

I can successfully navigate to Section1 (i.e. http://localhost:123/section1/). But when I enter Section2 (http://localhost:123/section1/section2), this error appears:

The view ‘Section2/’ or its master was not found or no view engine
supports the searched locations. The following locations were
searched: ~/Views/section1/Section2/.aspx
~/Views/section1/Section2/.ascx ~/Views/Shared/Section2/.aspx
~/Views/Shared/Section2/.ascx ~/Views/section1/Section2/.cshtml
~/Views/section1/Section2/.vbhtml ~/Views/Shared/Section2/.cshtml
~/Views/Shared/Section2/.vbhtml

I hope this all makes sense. If there is a better way to approach this, please let me know.

My immediate problem is getting this to navigate out to the index page for each of the sections (1, 2, 3, and 4), with a controller at the section 1 level. If that’s not possible, what is an efficient way to approach this? Either way, I’ll probably need to see a code example.

Second to that, is there a decent way to utilize a sitemap on an MVC3 site? If so, what approach would I use?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

The problem with your route is that it comes after the default route. MVC will stop at the first route that matches, which is always going to be the default. You need to move it above the default route in the collection by declaring it first.

You can solve your problem entirely with routing if the sections are fixed. That’s pretty easy to do.

The reason your controller based solution didn’t work is because you were trying to pass the id as part of the View name. That’s not how it works. You would do something like this:

public ActionResult Section2(string id) 
{ 
    return View("Section2", new { id=id }); 
} 

You can also create Areas, which will create subsections with complete MVC sites within them. Areas are a great feature, but may not be exactly what you want in all cases.

There’s also Portable Areas, which allows you to seperate areas into their own assemblies and thus their own projects.

You can also parse your own URL by using what’s known as a “slug” to parse any content that comes after the controller name.

Regarding Sitemap, you might give this a try

https://github.com/maartenba/MvcSiteMapProvider