Question

MVC has great tools for building urls inside an MVC app by using routing. Routing by controller and action lets us avoid hard coding urls in markup.

But we have a bunch of ancillary services that need to create urls for marketing emails.

For instance, our email marketing campaigns may need to build a url for an offer. The MVC app knows how to build the url to the offer detail, but is there a clever way of doing this for the service app? Can we/should we move routing into a separate dll and reference it from one place?

Success stories/horror stories are appreciated.

Answer 1

it sounds like you should be using a catchall url to lookup actions you can manage in a DB such as:

Route like this

routes.MapRoute(
                               "MailCampaigns", 
                               "/mailcampaigns/{*url}", 
                              new {controller = "MailCampaigns", action = "Incoming" }
                              );


public ActionResult Incoming(string url)
{

   //parse the url and perform actions accordingly

   var actionInfo = repository.Query<ActionInfo>().Where(x => x.Url == url).SingleOrDefault();

 return Redirect(actionInfo.TargetUrl);

}