Question

The website I’m working on has some fairly complicated routing structures and we’re experiencing some difficulties working with the routing engine to build URLs the way we need them to be built.

We have a search results page that uses RegEx based pattern matching to group several variables into a single route segment (i.e. “www.host.com/{structuralParameters}” can be the following: “www.host.com/variableA-variableB-variableC” – where variables A through C are all optional). This is working for us fine after a bit of work.

The problem we are experiencing resolves around an annoying feature of the ActionLink method: if you point to the same controller/action it will retain the existing route values whether you want them or not. We prefer to have control over what our links look like and, in some cases, cannot have the existing parameters retained. An example would be where our site’s main navigation leads to a search results page with no parameters set – a default search page, if you like. I say this is an annoying feature because it is a rare instance of the ASP.Net MVC Framework seemingly dictating implementation without an obvious extension point – we would prefer not to create custom ActionLink code to write a simple navigation link in our master page!

I’ve seen some say that you need to explicitly set such parameters to be empty strings but when we try this it just changes the parameters from route values into query string parameters. It doesn’t seem right to me that we should be required to explicitly exclude values we aren’t explicitly passing as parameters to the ActionLink method but if this is our only option we will use it. However at present if it is displaying in the query string then it is as useless to us as putting the parameters directly into the route.

I’m aware that our routing structure exasperates this problem – we probably wouldn’t have any issue if we used a simpler approach (i.e. http://www.host.com/variableA/variableB/variableC) but our URL structure is not negotiable – it was designed to meet very specific needs relating to usability, SEO, and link/content sharing.

How can we use Html.ActionLink to generate links to pages without falling back on the current route data (or, if possible, needing to explicitly excluding route segments) even if those links lead to the same action methods?

If we do need to explicitly exclude route segments, how can we prevent the method from rendering the routes as query string parameters?

This seemingly small problem is causing us a surprising amount of grief and I will be thankful for any help in resolving it.

EDIT: As requested by LukLed, here’s a sample ActionLink call:

// I've made it generic, but this should call the Search action of the 
// ItemController, the text and title attribute should say "Link Text" but there
// should be no parameters - or maybe just the defaults, depending on the route.
// 
// Assume that this can be called from *any* page but should not be influenced by
// the current route - some routes will be called from other sections with the same
// structure/parameters.
Html.ActionLink( 
    "Link Text",
    "Search", 
    "Item", 
    new { }, 
    new { title = "Link Text" } 
);

Answer 1

Setting route values to be null or empty string when calling Html.ActionLink or Html.RouteLink (or any URL generation method) will clear out the “ambient” route values.

For example, with the standard MVC controller/action/id route suppose you’re on “Home/Index/123”. If you call Html.RouteLink(new { id = 456 }) then MVC will notice the “ambient” route values of controller="Home" and action="Index". It will also notice the ambient route value of id="123" but that will get overwritten by the explicit “456”. This will cause the generated URL to be “Home/Index/456”.

The ordering of the parameters matters as well. For example, say you called Html.RouteLink(new { action = "About" }). The “About” action would overwrite the current “Index” action, and the “id” parameter would get cleared out entirely! But why, you ask? Because once you invalidate a parameter segment then all parameter segments after it will get invalidated. In this case, “action” was invalidated by a new explicit value so the “id”, which comes after it, and has no explicit value, also gets invalidated. Thus, the generated URL would be just “Home/About” (without an ID).

In this same scenario if you called Html.RouteLink(new { action = "" }) then the generated URL would be just “Home” because you invalidated the “action” with an empty string, and then that caused the “id” to be invalidated as well because it came after the invalidated “action”.