Question

Question:

I am creating a wiki software, basically a clone of wikipedia/mediawiki, but in ASP.NET MVC (the MVC is the point, so don’t recommend me ScrewTurn).

Now I have a question:

I use this route mapping, to route a URL like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASP.NET

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Wiki", // Routenname
            //"{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL mit Parametern
            "wiki/{id}", // URL mit Parametern
            new { controller = "Wiki", action = "dbLookup", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameterstandardwerte
        );

Now it just occured to me, that there might be titles like ‘AS/400’:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AS/400

Incidentially, there is also this one (title ‘Slash’):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//

And this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/null

Overall, Wikipedia seems to have a list of interesting titles like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_with_slashes_in_title

How do I make routes like this route correctly ?

Edit:
Something like:
If the URL starts with /Wiki/, and if it doesn’t start with /wiki/Edit/
(but not /Wiki/Edit)
then pass all the rest of the URL as Id.

Edit:
Hmm, just another problem:
How can I route this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C&A

Wikipedia can…

Edit:
According to wikipedia, due to clashes with wikitext syntax, only the following characters can never be used in page titles (nor are they supported by DISPLAYTITLE):

# < > [ ] | { }

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions_(technical_restrictions)#Forbidden_characters

Edit:
To allow * and &, put

<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="" />

into section <system.web> in file web.config

(Found here: http://www.christophercrooker.com/use-any-characters-you-want-in-your-urls-with-aspnet-4-and-iis)

Answer 1

You could use a catchall route to capture everything that follows the wiki part of the url into the id token:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Wiki",
    "wiki/{*id}",
     new { controller = "Wiki", action = "DbLookup", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);

Now if you have the following request: /wiki/AS/400 it will map to the following action on the Wiki controller:

public ActionResult DbLookup(string id)
{
    // id will equal AS/400 here
    ...
}

As far as /wiki// is concerned I believe you will get a 400 Bad Request error from the web server before this request ever reaches the ASP.NET pipeline. You may checkout the following blog post.