Routing
There are 14 entries for the tag
Routing
One annoyance that some developers have run into with ASP.NET MVC is that certain reserved filenames are not allowed in URLs. Often, this is manifested as a Bad Request error or a File Not Found (404) error.
The specifics of this restriction are accounted for in an interesting blog post entitled Zombie Operating Systems and ASP.NET MVC. This actually wasn’t a restriction on ASP.NET MVC but was built into the core of ASP.NET itself. Fortunately, ASP.NET 4 fixes this issue with a new setting. In web.config, simply add <httpRuntime relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping="true"/> to the system.web node. Here’s a snippet from my...
If you have a model object with a property named Id, you may have run into an issue where your model state is invalid when binding to that model even though you don’t have an “Id” field in your form. The following scenario should clear up what I mean. Suppose you have the following simple model with two properties. public class Product {
public int Id { get; set; }
public string Name { get; set; }
}
And you are creating a view...
Note: This describes the behavior of ASP.NET MVC 2 as of the release candidate. It’s possible things might change for the RTM.
When using areas in ASP.NET MVC 2, a common problem you might encounter is this exception message.
The controller name 'Home' is ambiguous between the following types:
AreasDemoWeb.Controllers.HomeController
AreasDemoWeb.Areas.Blogs.Controllers.HomeController
This message is telling you that the controller factory found two types that match the route data for the current request. Typically this happens when you have a controller of the same name in an area and in the main project.
For example, in the screenshot below, notice that we have...
A while back on a lark, I posted a prototype demonstrating how one could use Routing within Web Forms. This is something you can do today with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1, because of the work we did to separate Routing from ASP.NET MVC. I would have liked to include Web Form Routing as part of the Routing feature when we were working on SP1, but we didn’t have the time to do so in a robust manner before SP1 was locked down. Since then, Scott Galloway, who just happens to be my office mate, has taken the reigns and is...
ASP.NET Routing is useful in many situations beyond ASP.NET MVC. For example, I often need to run a tiny bit of custom code in response to a specific request URL. Let’s look at how routing can help. First, let’s do a quick review. When you define a route, you specify an instance of IRouteHandler associated with the route which is given a chance to figure out what to do when that route matches the request. This step is typically hidden from most developers who use the various extension methods such as MapRoute. Once the route handler makes...
Usability and Discoverability (also referred to as Learnability) are often confused with one another, but they really are distinct concepts. In Joel Spolsky’s wonderful User Interface Design for Programmers (go read it!), Joel provides an metaphor to highlight the difference. It takes several weeks to learn how to drive a car. For the first few hours behind the wheel, the average teenager will swerve around like crazy. They will pitch, weave, lurch, and sway. If the car has a stick shift they will stall the engine in the middle of busy intersections in a truly terrifying...
This is one of them “coming of age” stories about how a lowly method becomes a full fledged Action in ASP.NET MVC. You might think the two things are the same thing, but that’s not the case. It is not just any method gets to take the mantle of being an Action method. Routing Like any good story, it all begins at the beginning with Routing. By default, one of the routes defined in the MVC project template has the following URL pattern: {controller}/{action}/{id} When a request comes...
By default, ASP.NET Routing ignores requests for files that do not exist on disk. I explained the reason for this in a previous post on upcoming routing changes. Long story short, we didn’t want routing to attempt to route requests for static files such as images. Unfortunately, this caused us a headache when we remembered that many features of ASP.NET make requests for .axd files which do not exist on disk. To fix this, we included a new extension method on RouteCollection, IgnoreRoute, that creates a Route mapped to the StopRoutingHandler route handler (class that implements IRouteHandler). Effectively,...
A while back I wrote a sample that demonstrated how to use Routing with WebForms. If you missed it, you can download the code here With the recent announcement that Routing will be included with .NET 3.5 SP1, you can see why I wanted to put that demo together. I have since updated that sample to work with the versions of Routing that comes with the April CodePlex build of MVC. This should also work with the SP1 Beta. I’ll verify that when I get a moment. As part of this update, I added a new...
A while back I wrote a routing debugger which is useful for testing your routes and seeing which routes would match a given URL. Rob suggested we have something like this for unit tests, so I whipped something simple up.
This is a class that allows you to test multiple different URLs quickly. You simply create the RouteEvaluator giving it a collection of routes and then GetMatches which returns a List<RouteData> containing a RouteData instance for every route that matches, not just the first one.
Here's a sample of usage.
[Test]
public void CanMatchUsingRouteEvaluator()
{
var routes = new RouteCollection();
GlobalApplication.RegisterRoutes(routes);
var...
Made a few corrections on having default.aspx in the root due to a minor bug we just found. Isn’t preview code so much fun?
We’ve been making some changes to routing to make it more powerful and useful. But as Uncle Ben says, with more power comes more responsibility. I’ll list out the changes first and then discuss some of the implication of the changes.
Routes no longer treat the . character as a separator. Currently, routes treat the . and / characters as special. They are separator characters. The upcoming release of routing will only treat the...
In Scott Hanselman’s wonderful talk at Mix, he demonstrated a simple little route tester I quickly put together.
This utility displays the route data pulled from the request of the current request in the address bar. So you can type in various URLs in the address bar to see which route matches. At the bottom, it shows a list of all defined routes in your application. This allows you to see which of your routes would match the current URL.
The reason this is useful is sometimes you expect one route to match, but another higher up the stack matches instead. This...
UPDATE: I updated the sample to work with the final version of ASP.NET Routing included with ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. This sample is now being hosted on CodePlex.
Download the demo here
In my last post I described how Routing no longer has any dependency on MVC. The natural question I’ve been asked upon hearing that is “Can I use it with Web Forms?” to which I answer “You sure can, but very carefully.”
Being on the inside, I’ve had a working example of this for a while now based on early access to the bits. Even so, Chris Cavanagh impressively beats me to...
The ASP.NET Routing engine used by ASP.NET MVC plays a very important role. Routes map incoming requests for URLs to a Controller and Action. They also are used to construct an URL to a Controller/Action. In this way, they provide a two-way mapping between URLs and controller actions. When building routes, it may be useful to write unit tests for the routes to ensure that you’ve set up the proper mappings you intend. ScottGu touched a bit on unit testing routes in part 2 of his series on MVC in which he covers URL Routing. In this post,...