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Asked: 2026-05-10T19:43:04+00:00

On an ASP.NET MVC (Beta) site that I am developing sometimes calls to ActionLink

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On an ASP.NET MVC (Beta) site that I am developing sometimes calls to ActionLink will return to me URLs containing querying strings. I have isolated the circumstances that produce this behavior, but I still do not understand why, instead of producing a clean URL, it decides to using a query string parameter. I know that functionally they are the same, but for consistency (and appearance) of the URLs this is not what I want.

Here are my routes:

routes.MapRoute(     'Photo Gallery Shortcut',     'group/{groupname}',     new { controller = 'Photos', action = 'All', Id = '' });  routes.MapRoute(     'Tagged Photos', //since the Tagged action takes an extra parameter, put it first     'group/{groupname}/Photos/Tagged/{tagname}/{sortby}',     new { controller = 'Photos', action = 'Tagged', Id = '', SortBy = '' });  routes.MapRoute(     'Photo Gallery', //since the Gallery's defualt action is 'All' not 'Index' its listed seperatly     'group/{groupname}/Photos/{action}/{sortby}',     new { controller = 'Photos', action = 'All', Id = '', SortBy = '' });  routes.MapRoute(     'Group',  //<-- 'Group' Category defined above     'group/{groupname}/{controller}/{action}/{id}',     new {controller = 'Photos', action = 'Index', Id = ''});

Now the problem only occurs when I am looking at the view described by the route named ‘Tagged Photos’ and execute ActionLink via:

Html.ActionLink<PhotosController>(p => p.All((string)ViewData['group'], ''), 'Home')

Which produces the URL:

http://domain/group/GROUPNAME?sortBy=

From any other view the URL produced is:

http://domain/group/GROUPNAME

I have pulled down Phil’s ASP.NET Routing Debugger, and everything appears in order. This one has me stumped. Any ideas?

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1 Answer

  1. Not sure why different views are producing different URLs.

    But you can get rid of that sortBy param by assigning a default value to the first route.

    new { sortBy = ” }

    During generation, if sortBy matches the default, the route engine will skip that parameter (if it’s in the query string).

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