Question

I’ve been creating a blog, which contains of 3 diffrent views.
– Overview
– Post Detail
– Filtered overview

The filtered overview is based on blogposts which contain a certain tag, to make the url pretty I would love to get it like to be able to add optional parameters like the following:

mydomain.com/blog/<tagname>/<page>
mydomain.com/blog/<tagname1>/<tagname2>/<page>
mydomain.com/blog/<tagname1>/<tagname2>/<tagname3>/<page>

The pageing parameter is semi-optional, if not there it should be 1. But in most cases it will be there.
Are there ways to solve this issue in a nice way?
The only way I could think of was creating a lot of lines in my global asax which makes it kind of messy in my opinion.

Thanks in advance, DerDee

Answer 1

You could write a custom route:

public class BlogRoute : Route
{
    public BlogRoute()
        : base(
            "blog/{*info}", 
            new RouteValueDictionary(new 
            { 
                controller = "blog", 
                action = "index" 
            }),
            new MvcRouteHandler()
        )
    { 
    }

    public override RouteData GetRouteData(HttpContextBase httpContext)
    {
        var rd = base.GetRouteData(httpContext);
        if (rd == null)
        {
            return null;
        }

        var info = rd.Values["info"] as string;
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(info))
        {
            return rd;
        }

        var parts = info.Split('/');
        if (parts.Length < 1)
        {
            return rd;
        }

        for (int i = 0; i < parts.Length; i++)
        {
            if (i == parts.Length - 1)
            {
                int page;
                if (int.TryParse(parts[i], out page))
                {
                    rd.Values["page"] = page;
                }
            }

            if (!rd.Values.ContainsKey("page"))
            {
                rd.Values[string.Format("tags[{0}]", i)] = parts[i];
            }
        }

        return rd;
    }
}

which will be registered in Global.asax:

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

    routes.Add("BlogRoute", new BlogRoute());

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

and then you could have a BlogController:

public class BlogController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index(string[] tags, int? page)
    {
        ...
    }
}