How does [controller] work in route attribute of Web API controller?

Question

consider this code snippet:

[ApiController]
[Route("api/[controller]")]
public class HotelsController : ControllerBase
{
}

I understand that putting [controller] in the route will make the URL just api/hotels . My question is how does it do this? Does it take the whole string and cut off the part that is in the square brackets (in this case 'controller')?. Thus, I can call the class HotelsClass and put [class ] in the route and it accomplishes the same. Or, does it always have to be [controller] and it just recognizes that specific pattern?

I tried it the first way, expected it to work the same, but got an error in my application at the point where it maps the controllers, so I thought I would ask for clarity.

EDIT: I understand that the class should end in Controller and am not disputing that convention. I was just confused by the underlying mechanics of the [controller] token and how it worked, and didn't want to just blindly use something without knowing why it did what it did.

Answer 1

MVC and WebAPI (which is basically MVC without the V) rely on a number of conventions. One convention is that controllers ALWAYS have a name that ends with "Controller". There's no good reason to even want to break that convention, never mind to actually do it.