.NET MVC-4 routing with custom slugs

Question

I\'m rewriting a website project with ASP.Net MVC 4 and I find it difficult to setup the right routes. The url structure is not RESTful or following a controller/action patt

Answer 1

Since your links looks similar, you can't separate them at the routing level. But here are good news: you can write custom route handler and forget about typical ASP.NET MVC links' parsing.

First of all, let's append RouteHandler to default routing:

routes.MapRoute(
    "Default",
    "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    new { controller = "Default", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
).RouteHandler = new SlugRouteHandler();

This allows you to operate with your URLs in different ways, e.g.:

public class SlugRouteHandler : MvcRouteHandler
{
    protected override IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
    {
        var url = requestContext.HttpContext.Request.Path.TrimStart('/');

        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(url))
        {
            PageItem page = RedirectManager.GetPageByFriendlyUrl(url);
            if (page != null)
            {
                FillRequest(page.ControllerName, 
                    page.ActionName ?? "GetStatic", 
                    page.ID.ToString(), 
                    requestContext);
            }
        }

        return base.GetHttpHandler(requestContext);
    }

    private static void FillRequest(string controller, string action, string id, RequestContext requestContext)
    {
        if (requestContext == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext");
        }

        requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"] = controller;
        requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"] = action;
        requestContext.RouteData.Values["id"] = id;
    }
}

Some explanations are required here.

First of all, your handler should derive MvcRouteHandler from System.Web.Mvc.

PageItem represents my DB-structure, which contains all the necessary information about slug:

ContentID is a foreign key to contents table.

GetStatic is default value for action, it was convenient in my case.

RedirectManager is a static class which works with database:

public static class RedirectManager
{
    public static PageItem GetPageByFriendlyUrl(string friendlyUrl)
    {
        PageItem page = null;

        using (var cmd = new SqlCommand())
        {
            cmd.Connection = new SqlConnection(/*YourConnectionString*/);
            cmd.CommandText = "select * from FriendlyUrl where FriendlyUrl = @FriendlyUrl";
            cmd.Parameters.Add("@FriendlyUrl", SqlDbType.NVarChar).Value = friendlyUrl.TrimEnd('/');

            cmd.Connection.Open();
            using (var reader = cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection))
            {
                if (reader.Read())
                {
                    page = new PageItem
                               {
                                   ID = (int) reader["Id"],
                                   ControllerName = (string) reader["ControllerName"],
                                   ActionName = (string) reader["ActionName"],
                                   FriendlyUrl = (string) reader["FriendlyUrl"],
                               };
                }
            }

            return page;
        }
    }
}

Using this codebase, you can add all the restrictions, exceptions and strange behaviors.

It worked in my case. Hope this helps in yours.