Question

When building a multi-lingual website (with ASP.NET web forms), I’ll use an HTTP module to rewrite the URLs to end up with something friendly (for humans & search engines) like:

uk/products/product_category_one/sub_category_one/index.aspx uk/products/product_category_one/sub_category_one/widget_mk5.aspx es/productos/categoría_de_producto_una/widget_mk5.aspx 

My (newbie) understanding of MVC is that the URL should take the format of

Controller / Action / Identifier

so replicating the functionality above with MVC will end up with URLs similar to:

products/category/123/product_category_one/sub_category_one products/items/456/widget_mk5 

Questions..

• Can I insert a country code into the URL before the ‘controller’ segment?
• Is it possible to map ‘products’ and ‘productos’ to the same controller?

Thanks for your help

Edit: In addition to Panos’ answer below I found more information on the ASP.NET Website.

Answer 1

The URL can take almost any other form you like. For more info, check ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing. Just for starting (since I am not sure if it is the optimum solution), you can add two new routes in your global.asax:

        routes.MapRoute(             'ukRoute',             '{lang}/Products/{action}/{id}/{subcategory}',             new { lang = 'uk', controller = 'Products', action = 'Index', id = '', subcategory = '' }         );         routes.MapRoute(             'esRoute',             '{lang}/Productos/{action}/{id}/{subcategory}',             new { lang = 'es', controller = 'Products', action = 'Index', id = '', subcategory = '' }         ); 

These routes understand the following URLs (and map both of them to the ActionResult Category(string id, string subcategory) method of ProductsController):

uk/Products/Category/1/A es/Productos/Category/1/A 

If you want to create such URLs in your views you can use something like:

<%= Html.RouteLink('English 1.A', 'ukRoute', new { lang = 'uk', action = 'Category', id = '1', subcategory = 'A' })%> <%= Html.RouteLink('Spanish 1.A', 'esRoute', new { lang = 'es', action = 'Category', id = '1', subcategory = 'A' })%>