Question

I’ve been writing a blog as a learning project for a while now and I’ve just rewritten my URL structure in order to improve the organisation of my controllers. This has gone fairly smoothly, but I have a little problem with a conflicting route.

I’m trying to setup my URL structure as follows:

/
/page/2
/category
/category/page/2

The categories are stored within the database. This works fine at the moment, but I just noticed that when I try to link back to the home page that it’s hitting /page instead.

Here’s my current route table:

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

    routes.MapRoute(
        "Admin",
        "admin",
        new { controller = "Admin", action = "Index" }
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
        "ShowPagedPostsByCategory",
        "{category}/page/{page}",
        new { controller = "Posts", action = "Index", page = UrlParameter.Optional },
        new { page = @"(\d+)?" }
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
        "ShowPagedPosts",
        "page/{page}",
        new { controller = "Posts", action = "Index", page = UrlParameter.Optional },
        new { page = @"(\d+)?" }
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
        "ShowPostsByCategory",
        "{category}",
        new { controller = "Posts", action = "Index" }
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
        "ShowTaggedPosts",
        "posts/tagged/{tag}",
        new { controller = "Posts", action = "ShowTaggedPosts", tag = UrlParameter.Optional }
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
        "EditDeleteComment",
        "posts/{action}/{id}",
        new { controller = "Posts" },
        new { action = @"EditComment|DeleteComment", id = @"\d+" }
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
        "AddComment",
        "{controller}/comment",
        new { controller = "Posts", action = "Comment" }
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
        "ShowPost",
        "{controller}/{PostID}/{*slug}",
        new { controller = "Posts", action = "ShowPost", slug = UrlParameter.Optional },
        new { PostID = @"\d+" }
    );

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

I can see what the problem is: the home URL of ‘/’ is matching with the ShowPagedPosts route, but moving that below the default route seems to be the wrong thing to do. That makes me think my approach to this is a bit off. Can anyone point me in the right direction please?

Edit: Actually, with RouteDebugger I can see that it’s actually matching the ShowPagedPosts and ShowPostsByCategory routes.

Answer 1

When using Html.ActionLink, the first matching route will be used.

If you want to use another specific route, use Html.RouteLink which takes the route’s name as a parameter.