NancyFX Catch All route

Question

Does NancyFX supports ASP.NET MVC like \'Catch All\' route? I need one, that basically match every URL. This is very handy for building up Single Page applications.

Is t

Answer 1

Tested in Nancy version 0.23.2

Get[@"/(.*)"] did not work for me as a catch-all route. The routes "/", "/foo/bar", and longer routes would not catch. It seems like there's no getting around having to define a Get["/"] route for the root URL. Nothing else seems to catch it (tried Get["{uri*}"]). Here's how I ended up defining my routes (keep in mind I'm doing this for an Angular application):

Get["/views/{uri*}"] = _ => { return "A partial view..."; };
Get["/"] =
Get["/{uri*}"] = _ =>
{
    var uri = (string)_.uri;// The captured route
    // If you're using OWIN, you can also get a reference to the captured route with:
    var environment = this.Context.GetOwinEnvironment();// GetOwinEnvironment is in the 'Nancy.Owin' namespace
    var requestPath = (string)environment["owin.RequestPath"];
    return View["views/defaultLayout.html"];
};

It's important to understand Pattern Scoring. The route patterns are weighted, if two routes match the same url segment, the higher score wins. The catch-all pattern is weighted 0 and even though the /views/{uri*} route pattern is also a catch-all, it starts with a literal, which is weighted 10000, so it will win out on all routes that start with /views.

Here's more info on Accessing Owin's Environment Variables. Note that the captured uri variable and requestPath will be slightly different. The requestPath will start with a / where as the uri variable will not. Also, if the matched route pattern is Get["/"], uri will be null and requestPath will be "/".

The Views route will return a partial html file, based on the url path, and all other routes will return the default Layout page that will bootstrap the SPA.