Question

It would be great if someone could help me on this problem as I am new to web development and ASP.NET MVC. My goal is to design an MVC application which could help users to create their own mini websites. Each user will get their own mini websites and an admin panel to change the pages and template of their sites. I think there are scripts out there to achieve something similar, but we need to create our own for our specific requirements
Towards that goal I created a main mvc 3 application and I created an area as Site under it. We want the user to have their own sub domain urls like http://www.site1.mainsite.com where site1 is the name of the mini site of the user. For that I added 2 routes one for the main site and another for the area like

routes.MapRoute(
            "Default", // Route name
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
            new[] { "MainSite.UI.Controllers" }
        );

In Area Registration

context.MapRoute(
            "Sites_default",
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
            new {controller = new SiteConstraint()},
            new[] { "MainSite.UI.Areas.Site.Controllers" });

Both of them have the same url type, but area route have a constraint where I added like

var url = httpContext.Request.Headers["HOST"];
        var storeName = url.Split('.')[1];
        var match = storeName != "mainsite";
        return match;

so far its working, But i dont think its a good design. Now apart from this I need to add 2 more areas one is siteadmin and another is blog.
What should be best way to achieve this?

• sub domain urls should be directed to area “site”
• subdomain url/Admin should be routed to area “siteadmin”
• domain/blog should be routed to blog area.
• domain other urls should be handled by main controllers

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

I didnt get even one reply 🙁 But I tried playing with the routes and achieved some what near to what I was looking for.
Thanks to Route Debugger, It helped me to see what was going wrong with the routes

When I tried adding another area “Admin”, and registered it with the route below

context.MapRoute(
            "SiteAdmin_default",
            "Admin/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            new { controller = "Dashboard", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
            new { controller = new SiteConstraint() },
            new[] { "MainSite.UI.Areas.SiteAdmin.Controllers" }
        );  

Things started going wrong. Route Debugger helped to me to figure out, what was happening.
For me the order of the Routes really mattered, so I had to make sure that my areas were registered in the correct order.

AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas()

was not registering my routes in the correct order, Googling gave me this helper method.

public static class RouteHelper
{
    public static void RegisterArea<T>(RouteCollection routes, object state) where T : AreaRegistration
    {
        var registration = (AreaRegistration)Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(T));
        var context = new AreaRegistrationContext(registration.AreaName, routes, state);
        var tNamespace = registration.GetType().Namespace;
        if (tNamespace != null)
        {
            context.Namespaces.Add(tNamespace + ".*");
        }
        registration.RegisterArea(context);
    }
}

That method helped me to register the areas in the required order in the Global asax as

 RouteHelper.RegisterArea<SiteAdminAreaRegistration>(RouteTable.Routes, null);
 RouteHelper.RegisterArea<SiteAreaRegistration>(RouteTable.Routes, null);

I am writing it down, what I got so far as an answer so that someone else may be find it useful.