Force case-sensitive routing in ASP.NET MVC

Question

This question has been asked in a similar but not identical fashion (and not resolved to my satisfaction) previously on Stack Overflow and elsewhere.

Coming from a linux-world, I want to use ASP.NET MVC but avoid identical but differently-cased routes from resolving to the same page. I do not want to force all routes to be 100% lowercase.

e.g. I want /Home/Something to be a valid route and /Home/somethingElse to also be a valid route, but not /Home/something or /home/somethingelse, given two functions called Something and somethingElse in the HomeController.

I can't find any way of doing this from within the RegisterRoutes function, but maybe I'm missing something obvious? I can answer this easily enough by adding code to each Controller function, but I'm obviously trying to avoid doing that.

Optimally, the solution would involve catching all permutations of a particular route, then 301 redirecting any that do not exactly match the case of the controller's function.

Charis

MVC and ASP.NET Webforms can both use the same routing engine. – Forgetmenot

It's worth noting that you haven't indicated C# or VB.Net - VB.Net is inherently case-insensitive. – Fipple

Answer 1

I was unable to find any way of doing this after extensive searching. Basically, case-sensitivity and IIS/ASP.NET apparently do not go together.

We're now using a bit of a kludge to solve this. The code has been opensourced (MIT license) on github: NeoSmart Web Toolkit, in particular, this file containing the SEO redirect code.

Using it is easy enough: each GET method in the controller classes needs to add just this one line at the start:

Seo.SeoRedirect(this);

The SEO rewrite class automatically uses C# 5.0's Caller Info attributes to do the heavy lifting, making the code above strictly copy-and-paste.

Ideally, I would love to find a way to turn that line of code into an attribute. For instance, prefixing the controller methods with [CaseSensitive] would automatically have the same effect as writing in that line, but alas, I do not (yet) know how to do this.

I also can't find any way of figuring this out with the Routing class/structures. That's some opaque code!

Charis