Question

Pretty basic question here. How come I get a 404 error when I try to view

/Vendors/123

But I can see the page if I go to

/Vendors/Index/123

Is there any way for me to make it work the first way? I’m just using the default routes being registered in Global.asax.

Answer 1

Because that’s how the default route is defined. If you don’t want to specify an actionname you could modify it like this:

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

This being said you probably shouldn’t be doing this because now in your route you do not have the possibility to specify the action name that you wish to invoke on a given controller which means that you can only have a single action on each controller and that action would be Index. On the other hand if you wanted to do this on some specific controller you could still preserve the default route and add another one:

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

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