Question

My goal is to remove “home” from any actions in that controller (see bold).

site.com/home/about
site.com/about

site.com/home/contact
site.com/contact

I created the following custom route that sits above the generic base route:

// Used to hide 'home' in the url
routes.MapRoute(
            "Home", // Route name
            "{action}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "home", action= "index"} // Parameter defaults
);

This almost does what I want. I now get site.com/about, site.com/contact, etc. However, I cannot use index for my other controllers.

site.com/person/create -> works like a charm.
site.com/person/ -> no good.

How can I fix this? Thanks.

Answer 1

These two routes should work as expected:

routes.MapRoute(
   "NoHomeRoute", // Route name
   "{controller}/{action}", // URL with parameters
   new { controller = "Person", action= "Index"}, // Parameter defaults
   new { controller = @"person|admin|..." } // Parameter constraints
);
routes.MapRoute(
   "HomeRoute", // Route name
   "{action}", // URL with parameters
   new { controller = "home", action= "index"} // Parameter defaults
);

Since every application has a predefined set of controllers you can put all except home in the upper constraint and it will work. But if you create a new controller, remember to put it in as well. I’ve put in person for PersonController which you obviously have and also added admin for AdminController you probably don’t have, but I needed to put in something to show you the pattern of adding your controllers.

If you’re willing to play around with regular expressions, then you could maybe come up with a solution that excludes home instead of includes all except home the way that upper route definitions suggest.

A revised negative constraint

I’ve checked MVC code and indeed you can define a future proof constraint on the first route definition this way:

routes.MapRoute(
   "NoHomeRoute", // Route name
   "{controller}/{action}", // URL with parameters
   new { controller = "Person", action= "Index"}, // Parameter defaults
   new { controller = @"(?!home).*" } // Parameter constraints
);

Why should this work? Because the line on ProcessConstraint method has these two lines at the end:

string pattern = "^(" + str + ")$";
return Regex.IsMatch(input, pattern, RegexOptions.CultureInvariant | RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);