Question

In my Asp.Net Mvc project I’d like to have a good looking urls, e.g. mysite.com/Page2, and I want to redirect from my old style urls (such as mysite.com?page=2) with 301 state so that there won’t be two urls with identical content. Is there a way to do it?

As far as I know Asp.Net binding framework doesn’t make difference between query string and curly brace params

Answer 1

Well, as far as I can see performing such redirection in ASP.NET MVC might be tricky. This is how I did it:

global.asax:

        routes.Add(new QueryStringRoute());

        routes.MapRoute(null, "Article/{id}/{name}",
            new { controller = "Article", action = "View", page = 1 },
            new { page = @"\d+" }
        );

        routes.MapRoute(null, "Article/{id}/{name}/Page{page}",
            new { controller = "Article", action = "View" },
            new { page = @"\d+" }
        );

QueryStringRoute.cs:

public class QueryStringRoute : RouteBase
{
    private static string[] queryStringUrls = new string[]
    {
        @"~/Article/\d{1,6}/.*?page=\d{1,3}"
    };


    public override RouteData GetRouteData(HttpContextBase httpContext)
    {
        string url = httpContext.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath;

        foreach (string queryStringUrl in queryStringUrls)
        {
            Regex regex = new Regex(queryStringUrl);
            if (regex.IsMatch(url))
            {
                long id = 0; /* Parse the value from regex match */
                int page = 0; /* Parse the value from regex match */
                string name = ""; /* Parse the value from regex match */

                RouteData rd = new RouteData(this, new MvcRouteHandler());

                rd.Values.Add("controller", "QueryStringUrl");
                rd.Values.Add("action", "Redirect");
                rd.Values.Add("id", id);
                rd.Values.Add("page", page);
                rd.Values.Add("name", name);
                rd.Values.Add("controllerToRedirect", "Article");
                rd.Values.Add("actionToRedirect", "View");

                return rd;
            }
        }

        return null;
    }


    public override VirtualPathData GetVirtualPath(RequestContext requestContext, RouteValueDictionary values)
    {
        return null;
    }
}

QueryStringUrlController.cs:

public class QueryStringUrlController : Controller
{
    public RedirectToRouteResult Redirect(long id, int page, string name,
        string controllerToRedirect, string actionToRedirect)
    {
        return RedirectToActionPermanent(actionToRedirect, controllerToRedirect, new { id = id, page = page, name = name });
    }
}

Assuming you have such routing as in my global.asax file (listed above) you can create a custom Route class that will handle incoming requests and map them on a special redirection controller which will then redirect them to appropriate urls with 301 state. Then you must add this route to global.asax before your “Article” routes