UPDATE: 2011/02/13: This code is now included in the RouteMagic NuGet package! To use this code, simply run Install-Package RouteMagic within the NuGet Package Manager Console.

In general, once you deploy your ASP.NET MVC application, you can’t change the routes for your application without recompiling the application and redeploying the assembly where your routes are defined.

routesThis is partly by design as routes are generally considered application code, and should have associated unit tests to verify that the routes are correct. A misconfigured route could seriously tank your application.

Having said that, there are many situations in which the ability to change an application’s routes without having to recompile the application comes in very handy. This is the situation I find myself in as I build a blog engine where the folks who will install may want to tweak the routes without having to recompile the blog’s source code.

In this post, I’ll demonstrate an approach that’ll allow you to define your routes in a content file as code(no XML here!) which you deploy with your application as in the screenshot.

Routes File In Soultion

In my implementation, you need to place the routes in a Config folder in your web root. Note that I used Visual Studio’s Properties dialog to mark the file’s Build Action as “Content” so that it’s not compiled into my application.

Properties

What this means is that the code in the Routes.cs file is not compiled with the application. Instead, we will dynamically compile it. First, let’s look at the contents of that file. It shouldn’t be too surprising.

using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;
using EditableRoutesWeb;

public class Routes : IRouteRegistrar
{
  public void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
  {
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

    routes.MapRoute(
      "Default",
      "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
      new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
    );
  }
}

One thing you’ll notice is that this class implements an interface named IRouteRegistrar. This is an interface I created and added to my web application (though it could be defined in another assembly).

The code in Global.asax.cs for this application simply calls an extension method I wrote.

protected void Application_Start()
{
  AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();
  RouteTable.Routes.RegisterRoutes("~/Config/Routes.cs");
}

It’s the code in this extension method where the real magic happens.

Before I show the code, there are two concepts at work here that make this work. The first is using the BuildManager to dynamically create an assembly from the Routes.cs file. From that assembly, we can create an instance of the type Routes and cast it to IRouteHandler.

var assembly = BuildManager.GetCompiledAssembly("~/Config/Routes.cs");
var registrar = assembly.CreateInstance("Routes") as IRouteRegistrar;

Once we have an instance of a route registrar, we can call RegisterRoutes on that instance.

The second concept is being able to get notification when the Routes.cs file changes. The clever trick that David told me about is using the ASP.NET Cache object to do that. When you add an item to the cache, you can give it a cache dependency pointing to a file and a method to call when the cache is invalidated.

With those two pieces, we can add a cache dependency pointing to Routes.cs and a callback method which will reload the routes when Routes.cs is changed.

Here’s the full listing for RouteRegistrationExtensions.

public static class RouteRegistrationExtensions
{
  public static void RegisterRoutes(this RouteCollection routes, 
      string virtualPath)
  {
    routes.ReloadRoutes(virtualPath);
    ConfigFileChangeNotifier.Listen(virtualPath, 
      vp => routes.ReloadRoutes(vp));
  }

  static void ReloadRoutes(this RouteCollection routes, string virtualPath)
  {
    var assembly = BuildManager.GetCompiledAssembly(virtualPath);
    var registrar = assembly.CreateInstance("Routes") as IRouteRegistrar;
    using(routes.GetWriteLock())
    {
      routes.Clear();
      registrar.RegisterRoutes(routes);
    }
  }
}

This uses a class called ConfigFileChangeNotifier which is based on some code David wrote for Dynamic Data.

public class ConfigFileChangeNotifier
{
  private ConfigFileChangeNotifier(Action<string> changeCallback)
    : this(HostingEnvironment.VirtualPathProvider, changeCallback)
  { 
  }

  private ConfigFileChangeNotifier(VirtualPathProvider vpp, 
      Action<string> changeCallback) {
    _vpp = vpp;
    _changeCallback = changeCallback;
  }

  VirtualPathProvider _vpp;
  Action<string> _changeCallback;

  // When the file at the given path changes, 
  // we'll call the supplied action.
  public static void Listen(string virtualPath, Action<string> action) {
    var notifier = new ConfigFileChangeNotifier(action);
    notifier.ListenForChanges(virtualPath);
  }

  void ListenForChanges(string virtualPath) {
    // Get a CacheDependency from the BuildProvider, 
    // so that we know anytime something changes
    var virtualPathDependencies = new List<string>();
    virtualPathDependencies.Add(virtualPath);
    CacheDependency cacheDependency = _vpp.GetCacheDependency(
      virtualPath, virtualPathDependencies, DateTime.UtcNow);
      HttpRuntime.Cache.Insert(virtualPath /*key*/,
        virtualPath /*value*/,
        cacheDependency,
        Cache.NoAbsoluteExpiration,
        Cache.NoSlidingExpiration,
        CacheItemPriority.NotRemovable,
        new CacheItemRemovedCallback(OnConfigFileChanged));
  }

  void OnConfigFileChanged(string key, object value, 
    CacheItemRemovedReason reason) {
    // We only care about dependency changes
    if (reason != CacheItemRemovedReason.DependencyChanged)
      return;

    _changeCallback(key);

    // Need to listen for the next change
    ListenForChanges(key);
  }
}

With this in place, you can now change routes within the Routes.cs file in the Config directory after you’ve deployed the application. Note that technically, a recompilation is happening, but it’s happening dynamically at runtime when the file changes and there’s no need to restart your entire App Domain, which is one benefit of this approach over using the code in App_Code.

If you want to try this code out, you can download a sample project here. The sample app is compiled against ASP.NET MVC 2 RC, but the same principles and code can be used with an ASP.NET MVC 1.0 application. In fact, it can also be used in an ASP.NET 4 Web Forms application since we now support page routing.

Note, if you want to see the old version of this code, I’ve archived it here.