MVC routing issue

Question

Currently I'am working on an MVC project in which I try to get a kind of dynamic routing working. My idea would be that i left the original route in the global.asax.cs, so this one will take care of every controller I make. For example the Contact and Account controllers.

Above controllers will have url's like

/Contact/
/Account/Logoff/ etc.

The second route I want to add is the one that is a kind of default route when there are no controllers found. In that case I assume this will be a route to a page or pagedetails.

Url's for example will be :

/BBQ/
/BBQ/Accesoires/

I have three routes added in the global.asax.cs which I think are correct. (Also in the correct order). Below I have added the routes:

routes.MapRoute(
"DefaultRoute", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Page", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute(
"DefaultPageRoute",
"{category}",
new { controller = "Page", action = "Index", category = UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute(
"SecondLevelPageRoute",
"{category}/{subCategory}",
new { controller = "Page", action = "PageDetails", category = UrlParameter.Optional, subCategory = UrlParameter.Optional });

with this setup the calls to the controllers work fine, but to the pages like /BBQ/ it gives below error:

Server Error in '/' Application.

The resource cannot be found.

If I comment the first route and go the the /BBQ/ url it works like a charm. What am I overseeing in this routetable?

Answer 1

You put the default route first, so it is trying to go to a route defined by {controller = "BBQ", Action = "Index" }

That route should be the very last route. However, you need more detail in your routes. Just having a category route will cause problems.

For example, if this route is first

routes.MapRoute(
"DefaultPageRoute",
"{category}",
new { controller = "Page", action = "Index", category = UrlParameter.Optional });

Then a call to the URL /Contact/ will assume that you want to go to Page/Index/Contact not /Contact/Index/{id} . I would use a more specific route that signifies that you are browsing a category like:

routes.MapRoute(
"DefaultPageRoute",
"Category/{category}",
new { controller = "Page", action = "Index", category = UrlParameter.Optional });

So you will need to use a url www.mysite.com/Category/BBQ to view what you want, but I don't think that's all bad.