ASP.NET MVC Routing: Clean Urls - from camel case to hyphenated words

Question

I currently have an action defined in my controller:

    // GET: /schools/:cleanUrlName/data-loggers
    public ActionResult DataLoggers(string cleanUrlName)
    {
        return View();
    }

This works when I hit "/schools/brisbane-state-high-school/dataloggers", however - as per the comment - I want to access it via a slightly cleaner url (using hyphens): "/schools/brisbane-state-high-school/data-loggers". I know I could write a route to accomplish this, but I was hoping I wouldn't have to write a new route for every multi-worded action/controller. Is there a better way to address this?

Misanthrope

Answer 1

You can use the ActionNameAttribute to create an alias for your action name.

So you just need to annotate your multi worded actions:

[ActionName("data-loggers")]
public ActionResult DataLoggers(string cleanUrlName)
{
    return View("DataLoggers");
}

But because this affects also the view discovery therefore you need to return View("DataLoggers") so you are probably better with creating custom routes for your multi worded actions.

Veradis

If you want some more generic solution, you can have a look on the IIS url rewriting feature or you can derive from Route and remove the hyphens for the action name with overriding the GetRouteData method... – Veradis

Excellent! I think I'll use ActionName since it is just one line compared to the several lines required per route. I feel the RouteConfig would get quite large if I I wrote a route for each multi-word action. Thanks. – Misanthrope

i am no longer able to add view with dash as said here , when tried this appears: The name is not allowed to contain any of these characters: . - @ <, . so i guess only solution is to rename the view after adding – Hypercatalectic