Refactoring MVC Routes

Some of my team members and myself are participating in the Houston AIR competition this weekend and we are building our project this week. Of course we’ll have to rebuild it from scratch on Saturday, but hopefully it’ll just be a bunch of re-typing and no surprises. Anyhow, one of my duties on the team is to configure MVC and the interfaces we’ll need and all that jazz. So when I went to setup the routes, I was surprised again at how flexible it all is to setup. Typically you can get by with the default route, but not in our case this time. Basically we wanted to have these routes:

/story/give
/story/{id}
/feature/{id}
/prayer/{id}
/{pagename}

By the way, our assigned charity is a church in Houston called the Household of Faith Church - South Acres. At first I had this: (which is TOTALLY RIDCULOUS, but I wanted to see them all)

routes.MapRoute(
"Home",
"",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Home" });

routes.MapRoute(
"GiveStory",
"give/story",
new { controller = "Main", action = "GiveStory" });

routes.MapRoute(
"Feature",
"feature/{id}",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Feature", id=UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute(
"Prayer",
"Prayer/{id}",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Prayer", id = UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute(
"Story",
"Story/{id}",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Story", id = UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute(
"About",
"About",
new { controller = "Main", action = "About"});

routes.MapRoute(
"Directions",
"Directions",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Directions" });

routes.MapRoute(
"SiteMap",
"SiteMap",
new { controller = "Main", action = "SiteMap" });

routes.MapRoute(
"Help",
"Help",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Help" });

I typically setup my routes early on because I usually know what I want the URLs to be and it helps when naming my actions on the controllers. So obvioulsy we only have one controller because it’s not a large site and they all kinda go together, but what’s up with all the actions on the route configuration? Ridiculous right? So let’s get rid of all that mess like this:

routes.MapRoute(
"GiveStory",
"give/story",
new { controller = "Main", action = "GiveStory" });

routes.MapRoute(
"Feature",
"feature/{id}",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Feature", id=UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute(
"Prayer",
"Prayer/{id}",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Prayer", id = UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute(
"Story",
"Story/{id}",
new { controller = "Main", action = "Story", id = UrlParameter.Optional });

routes.MapRoute(
"Page",
"{viewname}",
new { controller = "Main", action = "GetStatic", viewname = "Home" });

Simple enough right? So I created an action called GetStatic that just accepts the view name for that page. The action looks like this:

public ViewResult GetStatic(string viewname)
{
return View(viewname);
}

Now let’s address the other redundant mess I have here…the {feature/prayer/story}/{id} route. Basically we’re going to do that and add a constraint to the route like this:

routes.MapRoute(
"GiveStory",
"give/story",
new { controller = "Main", action = "GiveStory" });

routes.MapRoute(
"WebSectionRoute",
"{WebType}/{Id}",
new { Controller = "Main", action = "GetWebSection", Id = UrlParameter.Optional }, new {WebType = "Story|Feature|Prayer"});

routes.MapRoute(
"Page",
"{viewname}",
new { controller = "Main", action = "GetStatic", viewname = "Home" });

So what this says is if the WebType contains story/feature/prayer then use this route otherwise keep on going. I can’t express enough the importance of the route order here. It’s an easy thing to miss and I’ve caught the missed order a few times for other developers and myself. Make sur eyou put them in the order they need to be in and not in some random order. Well that’s it. Route configuration refactored and now it doesn’t have any redundant routes.

Thanks for reading!