An Introduction to URL Routing

Thanks...

Hi Steve,

Excellent Videos. so easy to understand. I have watched your first three videos of MVC. Got a solid understanding of model,view and controllers and various types of ActionResult, HtmlHelpers etc.

Stephen you rock. Nice video.

I agree with kumanan..

Excellent job Stephen, I have watched 4 of your videos so far and am planning to watch the rest over the weekend and write up my own first MVC Apps. Keep it up!

Good video, but how to include virtual directory path?

Example on video is based on server root, VS2008 :if you use physical Web Server rather than VS Web Server, it will ask create virtual directory? But that does not change routing table in Global.asax file, then application failed with 404 Error.

Thanks for your information.

if you put a bad date in the url with the archive/date example you get an error.  how can you handle this elegantly?

If you maintain MVC code, isn't there a possibilty that you'll inherit the dreaded spaghetti code with url routing?

very nice indeed

Hello Stephen and thanks for those great tutorials!

Can you please tell me how can I use routing with data retrieved from a database?

Let's say that I have an unrouted link like:

/Default.aspx?CategoryID=22

but that category has a name, which for each ID it can be different. So I will extract that data from the database.

Simply put, I want to dynamically build those links, like WordPress' links. Each link with its - let's say - title, retreived from a database.

Thank you!

Forgot to mention to my previous post, an unrouted link like

/Default.aspx?CategoryID=22 to be routed to /Categories/Cars

and

/Default.aspx?CategoryID=23 to be routed to /Categories/Trains

and so on.

Very good video

Thanks

Stephen,

Thanks. I'm getting this more and more. I sure wish you would've mentioned that controler functions can't be overloaded like you did in video three. Maybe overloaded controler functions will come in a future release! I'm confident everyone watching knows they can pass in a string and fanagle it to meet their needs so its no big deal. I've watched half the introductory videos so far.

Thanks! Jërëjëf!

It sure would be nice if I didn't have to look at this guys head while I am trying to pay attention to the code.

It would be so nice to not have to see this guy's head.

Hi Stephen,

I always wondered how this worked, now I know. :-) Is the member profile page on forums.asp.net designed in the same way? For e.g. my profile page is http://forums.asp.net/members/Vishal.aspx . So I assume this is achieved by URL Routing.

Thanks,

Stephen,

I am hitting a brick wall with these tutorials being in Visual Basic. I know nothing about Visual Basic, and am spending 20% of my time understanding the concepts, which are well presented, and 80% of my time converting the code from a language I know nothing about, Visual Basic, to C#, quite unsuccessfully I might add. The controller file looks almost nothing like that in C#. The written tutorial for C# only covers about 1/3 of the video tutorial. I could have used this material for a project I am doing. PLEASE, at a minimum provide full source code in C# for the ENTIRE video tutorial, and, better yet, provide complimentary video tutorials in C# (since they are only about 10 minutes each anyway).

Thanks.

That face isn't nessary to be shown! Agree?!

Stephen its really cool

stephen its really a great video for a beginner.

Thanks Stephen!

Resources useful for routing issues:

Routes are processed top down, first match is route used. You'll probably need the ability to debug your routes:

The first rule that fits the URL is the one that gets used. Default rules should be last.

The most general default rule should be the very last.

There's a really interesting tool and video that you might want to check out:

the RouteDebug dll tool is discussed in the last twenty minutes*

of Phil Haack's video: http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T44F,

"Ninja on Fire Black Belt Tips".

* Watch the entire video, it's worth your time.

ASP.NET MVC documentation is at MSDN:

Reference http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd566232.aspx

Routing is here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.routing.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.routing.routecollection.aspx

see also: http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/03/asp-net-mvc-best-practices-part-2.aspx

http://www.asp.net/learn/mvc/tutorial-23-cs.aspx

for IgnoreRoute see:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd505203.aspx in

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.mvc.routecollectionextensions.aspx.