DD4T Default route not working

Question

I am using the DD4T framework with SDL Tridion 2011 and ASP.NET MVC4

I have some non-DD4T Controllers and Views which I want to use, however I am getting a 404 error when I try to go to these urls.

This is my route table

    public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

        // Route for SDL Tridion UI 2011 (Aka !SiteEdit)
        routes.MapRoute(
            "SiteEditBlankPage",
            "se_blank.html",
            new { controller = "Empty", action = "Index" });

        routes.MapRoute(
            null, // Route name
            "xml/{*PageId}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Page", action = "Xml" }, // Parameter defaults
           new { pageId = @"^(.*)?$" } // Parameter constraints
        );

        // Tridion page route
        routes.MapRoute(
           "TridionPage",
           "{*PageId}",
           new { controller = "Page", action = "Page" }, // Parameter defaults
           new { pageId = @"^(.*)?$" } // Parameter constraints
        );

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

I have tried moving the default route above the Tridion one but then I get 404s for the Tridion pages.

The only way to get it working it seems is to have a specific route to my controller e.g:

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

Anyone have any ideas? As the above solution is not ideal.

(I do not have any UI 2012 config in my web.config)

Titillate

What do you mean by 'normal controllers'? Non-dd4t controllers, I guess? – Schwann

Answer 1

There are several options AFAICS:

1. If you can recognize a Tridion url from a 'normal' url (extension, startpath, etc) you can solve it by adjusting the TridionPage route. But this is no option for you I think, because if you can recognize the Tridion url's from the normal one's you already would have come up with this solution ;)

2. Implement a route-constraint on the TridionPage route. Check in this routeconstraint if the requested url is in the Broker. If true: return true, otherwise false. If it returns false, the next route (that matches) will handle the request. Not sure about performance though.

3. Your own option: a specific route for your normal pages.

I am sure I missed some options. Hopefully someone else shares them here.

Coracle

Thanks Albert. I think I'm probably going to have to go with the 3rd solution for now! If I think of a better way, I will update here. – Titillate

+1 to the specific route - that's how we tackled this. Obviously you dont have to have "MyController" in the url! – Herold

Answer 2

Normal DD4T operation is to let Tridion own the URLs, i.e. catch all URLs and pass them to one PageController. This interferes with the automatic routing of controllers/actions based on their names, so one of these niceties has to give!

I personally like Albert's first suggestion because it is simple. E.g. map only URLs ending with '.html' to Tridion. Unfortunately, this causes a problem with default pages in SGs, since "/sg" is not recognized, even though you may have a "/sg/index.html" in the broker. Some alternatives to work around that:

• Configure explicit routes for all your first-level structure groups (/news, /products, etc)

• Publish all Tridion pages into a subsection of your site, e.g. /content and map that to a specific route

Schwann

Thanks Quirijn. I'm not sure I can tell a Tridion Page from a "normal" action so I'm going to go with creating routes for my controllers I think. – Titillate

Answer 3

We just placed a page se_blank.html in the root and made sure it was only deployed to staging so it was there where needed and didn't require a specific route.

That is not really answering your question of course, but you can consider it as an option perhaps.

Thrasonical

Answer 4

Perhaps you could make a catch all mapping like the TridionPage mapping to a Controller which redirects to the correct controller and action based on the parameters with the RedirectToAction function?

Not sure if this is an ideal solution for you.

Anthe

Answer 5

Our solution: Tridion doesn't allow to create pages with 'mvc' inside the link => we defined a constraint that ignore PageId with 'mvc' in RouteConfig.

So: when DD4T receives a request for a "tridion" page, it uses the TridionPage route and when it's an request /Controller/Action it uses default MVC route.

routes.MapRoute(
"TridionPage",
"{PageId}",
new { controller = "Page", action = "Page" }, //parameter defaults
new { PageId = @"(?!mvc.)*" } // Parameter constraint: ignore PageId with '/'
);

//Default MVC route
routes.MapRoute(
"MVC", //Route name
"mvc/{controller}/{action}/{id}", 
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional}
);

Delenadeleon

What about pages in a structure group? Surely they would contain a slash? – Titillate