Question

Say I have a Controller with the following method:

public int Get(DateTime date)
{
    // return count from a repository based on the date
}

I’d like to be able to access method while passing the date as part of the URI itself, but currently I can only get it to work when passing the date as a query string. For example:

Get/2012-06-21T16%3A49%3A54-05%3A00 // does not work
Get?date=2005-11-13%205%3A30%3A00 // works

Any ideas how I can get this to work? I’ve tried playing around with custom MediaTypeFormatters, but even though I add them to the HttpConfiguration’s Formatters list, they never seem to be executed.

Answer 1

Let’s look at your default MVC routing code:

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

Okay. See the name id? You need to name your method parameter “id” so the model binder knows you that you want to bind to it.

Use this –

public int Get(DateTime id)// Whatever id value I get try to serialize it to datetime type.
{ //If I couldn't specify a normalized NET datetime object, then set id param to null.
    // return count from a repository based on the date
}