Question

I’ve created a system in MVC 3 using the NerdDinner tutorial as a base to work off. I’m not sure I fully understand Routing.

Everything was working fine until I added a sort to the Pagination helper that I have.

Here is the global.asax.cs

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

    routes.MapRoute(
        "UpcomingKeyDates", // Route name
        "KeyDates.mvc/{sortBy}/Page/{page}", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" } // Parameter defaults
    );

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

    routes.MapRoute(
        "Root", // Route name
        "", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", sortBy = "EventDate" } // Parameter defaults
    );

}

I want to default the list to sort by Event Date ascending when you first navigate to the page (which works fine). The sort and pagination also works fine. However, when I’m using this link…

<%: Html.ActionLink("Create New", "Create", "Home") %>

The link just directs to the same page. Do I need to add a new route, or amend an existing route? Any help much appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The default route should always appear last and is the catch-all route. It will automatically catch the empty route which is equivalent to http://yourdomain.com/

The default route should always have the following format

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

Also, if the page is going to be a number, you can constrain it using a regular expression (see below).

In brief, change your Global.asax so it looks like this:

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

    routes.MapRoute(
        "UpcomingKeyDates", // Route name
        "KeyDates.mvc/{sortBy}/Page/{page}", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" }, // Parameter defaults
        new { page = @"\d+" } // Note I have constrained the page so it has to be an integer...
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
       "MyDefaultRoute", // Your special default which inserts .mvc into every route
       "{controller}.mvc/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
       new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id=UrlParameter.Optional, sortBy = "EventDate" } // Parameter defaults
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
       "Default", // Real default route. Matches any other route not already matched, including ""
       "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id=UrlParameter.Optional, sortBy = "EventDate" } // Parameter defaults
    );
}