Can ASP.NET Routing be used to create “clean” URLs for .ashx (IHttpHander) handlers?

Question

I have some REST services using plain old IHttpHandlers. I\'d like to generate cleaner URLs, so that I don\'t have the .ashx in the path. Is there a way to us

Answer 1

EDIT: I just edited this code because I had some issues with the old one. If you're using the old version please update.

This thread is a bit old but I just re-wrote some of the code here to do the same thing but on a more elegant way, using an extension method.

I'm using this on ASP.net Webforms, and I like to have the ashx files on a folder and being able to call them either using routing or a normal request.

So I pretty much grabbed shellscape's code and made an extension method that does the trick. At the end I felt that I should also support passing the IHttpHandler object instead of its Url, so I wrote and overload of the MapHttpHandlerRoute method for that.

namespace System.Web.Routing
{
 public class HttpHandlerRoute : IRouteHandler where T: IHttpHandler
 {
  private String _virtualPath = null;

  public HttpHandlerRoute(String virtualPath)
  {
   _virtualPath = virtualPath;
  }

  public HttpHandlerRoute() { }

  public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
  {
   return Activator.CreateInstance();
  }
 }

 public class HttpHandlerRoute : IRouteHandler
 {
  private String _virtualPath = null;

  public HttpHandlerRoute(String virtualPath)
  {
   _virtualPath = virtualPath;
  }

  public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
  {
   if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(_virtualPath))
   {
    return (IHttpHandler)System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.CreateInstanceFromVirtualPath(_virtualPath, typeof(IHttpHandler));
   }
   else
   {
    throw new InvalidOperationException("HttpHandlerRoute threw an error because the virtual path to the HttpHandler is null or empty.");
   }
  }
 }

 public static class RoutingExtension
 {
  public static void MapHttpHandlerRoute(this RouteCollection routes, string routeName, string routeUrl, string physicalFile, RouteValueDictionary defaults = null, RouteValueDictionary constraints = null)
  {
   var route = new Route(routeUrl, defaults, constraints, new HttpHandlerRoute(physicalFile));
   routes.Add(routeName, route);
  }

  public static void MapHttpHandlerRoute(this RouteCollection routes, string routeName, string routeUrl, RouteValueDictionary defaults = null, RouteValueDictionary constraints = null) where T : IHttpHandler
  {
   var route = new Route(routeUrl, defaults, constraints, new HttpHandlerRoute());
   routes.Add(routeName, route);
  }
 }
}

I'm putting it inside the same namespace of all the native routing objects so it will be automatically available.

So to use this you just have to call:

// using the handler url
routes.MapHttpHandlerRoute("DoSomething", "Handlers/DoSomething", "~/DoSomething.ashx");

Or

// using the type of the handler
routes.MapHttpHandlerRoute("DoSomething", "Handlers/DoSomething");

Enjoy, Alex