Infinite URL Parameters for ASP.NET MVC Route

Question

I need an implementation where I can get infinite parameters on my ASP.NET Controller. It will be better if I give you an example :

Let's assume that I will have following urls :

example.com/tag/poo/bar/poobar
example.com/tag/poo/bar/poobar/poo2/poo4
example.com/tag/poo/bar/poobar/poo89

As you can see, it will get infinite number of tags after example.com/tag/ and slash will be a delimiter here.

On the controller I would like to do this :

foreach(string item in paramaters) { 

    //this is one of the url paramaters
    string poo = item;

}

Is there any known way to achieve this? How can I get reach the values from controller? With Dictionary<string, string> or List<string>?

NOTE :

The question is not well explained IMO but I tried my best to fit it. in. Feel free to tweak it

Answer 1

Like this:

routes.MapRoute("Name", "tag/{*tags}", new { controller = ..., action = ... });

ActionResult MyAction(string tags) {
    foreach(string tag in tags.Split("/")) {
        ...
    }
}

Answer 2

The catch all will give you the raw string. If you want a more elegant way to handle the data, you could always use a custom route handler.

public class AllPathRouteHandler : MvcRouteHandler
{
    private readonly string key;

    public AllPathRouteHandler(string key)
    {
        this.key = key;
    }

    protected override IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
    {
        var allPaths = requestContext.RouteData.Values[key] as string;
        if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(allPaths))
        {
            requestContext.RouteData.Values[key] = allPaths.Split('/');
        }
        return base.GetHttpHandler(requestContext);
    }
} 

Register the route handler.

routes.Add(new Route("tag/{*tags}",
        new RouteValueDictionary(
                new
                {
                    controller = "Tag",
                    action = "Index",
                }),
        new AllPathRouteHandler("tags")));

Get the tags as a array in the controller.

public ActionResult Index(string[] tags)
{
    // do something with tags
    return View();
}

Answer 3

That's called catch-all:

tag/{*tags}

Answer 4

Just in case anyone is coming to this with MVC in .NET 4.0, you need to be careful where you define your routes. I was happily going to global.asax and adding routes as suggested in these answers (and in other tutorials) and getting nowhere. My routes all just defaulted to {controller}/{action}/{id}. Adding further segments to the URL gave me a 404 error. Then I discovered the RouteConfig.cs file in the App_Start folder. It turns out this file is called by global.asax in the Application_Start() method. So, in .NET 4.0, make sure you add your custom routes there. This article covers it beautifully.