What should be the naming convention and folder structure for Contact Us View Page in .NET Core MVC?

Question

I have just started learning .NET Core MVC .I am creating a contact us view page .My doubt is should i create a structure where it is like this

1)

• Views(folder)
  -ContactUs(folder)

  -Index.cshtml

• Controller(folder)
  -ContactUsController.cs

2)

• Views(folder)

  -Home(folder)

  -ContactUs.cshtml

• Controller(folder)

  -HomeController.cs

3) This is similar to 1 just name change of cshtml file .Would like having a page as ContactUs.cshtml be better at seo rather than Index.cshtml?

• Views(folder)
  -ContactUs(folder)

  -ContactUs.cshtml

• Contorller(folder)

  -ContactUsController.cs

Answer 1

The way MVC load views for each ActionMethod in a controller is following this order:

/Views/[Controller]/[ActionMethod].cshtml
/Views/Shared/[ActionMethod].cshtml
/Pages/Shared/[ActionMethod].cshtml

For example, for a controller :

public IActionResult View1()
{
    return View();
}

public IActionResult View2()
{
    return View();
}

The usual folder structure for this should be:

Now, in this specific case. The usual way to offer a ContactUs page, is making this one an ActionMethod of the HomeController, instead of creating an entire controller for it.

Answer 2

Honestly from a 'code' point of view it doesn't matter. All the ways you've outlined above will work fine.

You will have the following URLs from them:

1 - /contactus 2 - /home/contactus 3 - /contactus/contactus

As you can see they will all work but you also need to consider things from an SEO point of view.

Ideally, you'd want a simple URL like /contactus to be used so in this case option 1 seems to be the best.

That said, you could still use option 2 or 3 but you would need to set up a Route in order to make the URL 'friendly'.

Something like this:

For example, in startup.cs for Option 2:

app.UseMvc(routes =>
{
    routes.MapRoute(
        name: "contact",
        defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "ContactUs" });
        template: "contactus");
});

says point yoursite.com/contactus to the home controller and the contactus action.

Note: Custom routes need to be placed before the default route.