Routing Reserved Words in ASP.Net

Question

I have a legacy url that I wish to map to a route in my ASP.Net MVC application

e.g. http://my.domain.com/article/?action=detail&item=22

<

Answer 1

controller,action and area are the only reserved words in asp.net MVC. "Reserved" means that MVC gives special meaning to them, especially for Routing.

There are also others words (COM1-9, LPT1-9, AUX, PRT, NUL, CON), not specific to asp.net, than can not be in the url. This is explained why here and how to by-pass here.

Edit : There are no ways to use them because asp.net mvc relies on them in route data.

Here is an decompiled example taken from UrlHelper :

// System.Web.Mvc.RouteValuesHelpers
public static RouteValueDictionary MergeRouteValues(string actionName, string controllerName, RouteValueDictionary implicitRouteValues, RouteValueDictionary routeValues, bool includeImplicitMvcValues)
{
    RouteValueDictionary routeValueDictionary = new RouteValueDictionary();
    if (includeImplicitMvcValues)
    {
        object value;
        if (implicitRouteValues != null && implicitRouteValues.TryGetValue("action", out value))
        {
            routeValueDictionary["action"] = value;
        }
        if (implicitRouteValues != null && implicitRouteValues.TryGetValue("controller", out value))
        {
            routeValueDictionary["controller"] = value;
        }
    }
    if (routeValues != null)
    {
        foreach (KeyValuePair current in RouteValuesHelpers.GetRouteValues(routeValues))
        {
            routeValueDictionary[current.Key] = current.Value;
        }
    }
    if (actionName != null)
    {
        routeValueDictionary["action"] = actionName;
    }
    if (controllerName != null)
    {
        routeValueDictionary["controller"] = controllerName;
    }
    return routeValueDictionary;
}