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C# MVC utilising parameter on default route

I'm using MVC 4.
My default route on my site is Home/Index so when the user enters the URL www.example.com it goes to that route.
Could you let me know if it is also possible to receive a parameter appended to that URL i.e. www.example.com/param? It works if I use www.example.com/Home/Index/param but that's not ideal.
I'm guessing its something I need to add to the Global.asax but I can't find examples anywhere.

context.MapRoute(
"Home_all",
"/{*actions}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index"}
);
But be aware that route will match all urls , so you need to register it at last :) That Routing will be called like this in your Home Controller for example... Actions will be a part from the url, and you can even add some parameter in the query string
public ActionResult Index(string actions, string id)
{
}

Asp.net MVC Index page without domain paths

I believe this should have been asked and answered somewhere already, or is just a very basic thing, but I did not manage to find anything at all, I am guessing I might be querying my search wrong.
Either way, what I want is to display Index page without any domain paths.
What I want:
http://localhost:50024/
How I was able to make it with domain paths:
http://localhost:50024/Home/Index
I made a HomeController.cs and added a GET method for the Index view... which is in the Home folder under Views folder, and of course that creates domain paths. I do not care if I have to make extra controller or something, I just want it to display my index page without any paths. Thanks in advance!

You must set default values for the parameters in the route configuration in global.asax, similar to this:
routes.MapRoute( "Default", // Route name 
"{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters 
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" } // Parameter defaults );
So that when the route parameters are missing, the routing system points the request to the desired controller and action.

just tested myself so i know it works
Test
obviously replace with what you have for the defaults in your routing if you have modified them or something

If all you're after is the "root" URL, you can also use ~/, like so:
Home
The Razor engine is smart enough to parse that URL in place, without needing to use the UrlHelper class.

route controller action to just controller

I'm new into routing, and have a hopefully simple question toward it.
Right now, with the default routing, I need to use {controller}/{action}/{variable}.
This will mean (if I want to use a {variable}), I have to enter my URL as /Home/Index/1
Is there a way to make routing only use /Home/1 and send it to the Index action?
I need to use this only for a specific page, not all of them.
I have tried the following with no success:
routes.MapRoute(
"Alert",
"Alert/{id}",
new
{
controller = "Alert", action = "Index", id = ""
}

What you have should work. I surmise the reason your attempt does not work is that you have defined the default {controller}/{action}/{id} route before this one.
You have to register this route before any more general ones as the routing engine sends the request to the first action which matches the requested URL.

MVC Routes... How do I set up my controller to deal with /configuration/building/add

I have an architecture where I have numerous objects I can configure. Examples of URLs I want are as follows:
/configuration/building/add
/configuration/building/edit/1
/configuration/group/add
/configuration/group/edit/1
I have a Configuration controller but how do I intercept or deal with building/add and building/edit/1 etc... If it were AddBuilding I could simply add an AddBuilding() function, and similarily how do I get it to work for configuration/building/edit/

Here's what you can do for the first one - open up the Global.asax.cs file of your site and put this in RegisterRoutes before the standard MVC catch-all route (the one that uses the route "{controller}/{action}/{id}"):
routes.MapRoute("AddBuilding", "configuration/building/add",
new { controller = "Configuration", action = "AddBuilding" });
The others will be the same, but different names (first parameter) and action, whislt the edit routes but would include an {id} route placeholder and route parameter (but not optional - unlike the MVC default route):
routes.MapRoute("EditBuilding", "configuration/building/edit/{id}",
new { controller = "Configuration", action = "EditBuilding" });
By leaving the id off the route defaults we make it required. I'm assuming this, because I'm guessing the Url /Building/Edit doesn't logically map to anything.
As a side node - including verbs in your urls isn't really in keeping with REST methodology, however you're not the first to do it by a long way (I include myself in that too). That said - trying to keep to it usually makes your life a lot easier, as you'll find your controllers will be cleaner, as will your route table, and your site's URL space will be a lot smaller and more obviously hierarchical. This last point is - handy for zooming around the site at dev time, but more importantly it's crucial for SEO.
So (I've commented this code heavily, hopefully enough to provide some nuggets of knowledge!):
public class ConfigurationController{
////HTTP GET /Buildings
/// DISPLAYS BUILDINGS
public ActionResult Buildings(){
//get model and return view that shows all buildings with perhaps a
//partial in that for creating a new one (or you can use another action)
//The HTML form on that view will POST to the URL handled by the method below.
}
////HTTP POST /Buildings
/// CREATES A NEW BUILDING
//use ActionName here to make this and the method above accessible through
//the same URL
[ActionName("Buildings")]
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult CreateBuilding(BuildingModel model){
//validate the model, create the object and return the same
//view as the Buildings() method above (after re-loading all the
//buildings. Or, you can issue a redirect, effectively transferring
//control back to the method above.
}
////HTTP GET /Configuration/Building/id
///DISPLAYS A BUILDING
public ActionResult Building(int id){
//get building and return view, which also contains Edit functionality
}
////HTTP POST /Configuration/Building/id
///EDITS A BUILDING
[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Building(int id, BuildingModel model){
//very similar to the CreateBuilding method - and again you might
//either simply return a building view at the end, or redirect
//to the method above.
//Note that we don't need [ActionName] here because this and the
//get method can have the same method names, because they are overloads
//i.e. since they have different method signatures we can call them the same
//thing in code.
}
}
I've left off the group stuff to keep it short, and hopefully you'll be able to see how to do it from there.
With this in place, we only need at most two routes in Global.asax.cs - although I think the order will be important:
//handles both GET and POST to this URL, i.e. our view & edit operations
routes.MapRoute("IndividualBuilding", "/configuration/buildings/{id}",
new { controller = "Configuration", action = "Building" });
routes.MapRoute("Buildings", "/configuration/buildings",
new { controller = "Configuration", action = "Buildings" });
Now we are using the HTTP verbs to signify what we intend to do with a particular request, and our URLs have become more 'logical'.
Another refactor
If you want to be 'clever' you can lump both buildings and groups under two routes
//handles both GET and POST to this URL, i.e. our view & edit operations
routes.MapRoute("Individual", "/configuration/{controller}/{id}",
new { controller = "Configuration", action = "List" });
//again, handles GET and POST
routes.MapRoute("Collection", "/configuration/{controller}",
new { controller = "Configuration", action = "Single" });
Now you do both buildings and groups controllers as I showed above, but replace Buildings (remembering the ActionName attribute on the second method) with List and Building with Single.
One final thing to consider is that because of the default MVC route:
routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Default", action="Home", id = UrlParameter.Optional });
Both of your two controllers can still be routed via /Buildings/Single/1 or /Groups for example. This is a minor issue (dupe content isn't great SEO) but it can be something that people can use to sniff your site.
If you absolutely want to prevent this other url format; you can take out the default route, meaning you'd have to explicitly route other stuff that might already work (not a great issue).
Or you can use a little trick that will make it far harder: use explicit [ActionName] attributes with characters in the route name that won't be allowed through IIS - e.g. ":Single" or ":List", and then adjust our two routes from a couple of code blocks back accordingly.

So firstly you can create a controller action called AddBuilding() as you have hinted.
Then in your Global.asax file in the RegisterRoutes method you can add a route like so:
routes.MapRoute(
"AddBuilding", // Route name
"configuration/building/add", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Configuration", action = "AddBuilding" }
);
You should not though that you will likely still be able to access the page using "/configuration/addbuilding" because of your default route mapping.
You edit one will be similar expect you will want to map the ID value for this:
routes.MapRoute(
"EditBuilding", // Route name
"configuration/building/edit/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Configuration", action = "AddBuilding", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
I think you will need to add this code with the default MapRoute setup to ensure that one does not take priority

Another approach would be to create a Configuration MVC area, and then have a building and group controller in that Area.

You can do that by Attribute Routing in ASP.NET MVC 5. Something like following;
// eg: /reviews
[Route(“reviews”)]
public ActionResult Index() { … }
// eg: /reviews/5
[Route(“reviews/{reviewId}”)]
public ActionResult Show(int reviewId) { … }
// eg: /reviews/5/edit
[Route(“reviews/{reviewId}/edit”)]
public ActionResult Edit(int reviewId) { … }
You can add multiple route for the same controller as well. For details please check here

ASP.NET MVC: how to make all unspecified URLs direct to one controller

I've got an ASP.NET MVC app that's working nicely with a handful of controllers, e.g. "Home", "Services" and "Go". The "Go" controller is where all the content is.
Now the marketing folks have come and said they don't want to see the word "go" in the URL. In other words, instead of:
http://mydomain.com/go/geography/africa
they want to have:
http://mydomain.com/geography/africa
I cannot create a controller for every path that they might want... so is there any way of writing my routing in Global.asax.cs in such a way that requests to "services" and "home" will be treated the normal way, but anything else will implicitly be routed to the "go" controller?

Are you on IIS7? It might be easiest to just implement URL rewriting on the server for this, rather than hacking about with your routes in Global.asax.cs.
EDIT: I've only ever done URL rewriting in Apache. For what it's worth that would be done using something like this:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^go/(.+)$ /$1 [R=301,L]
Have a look at http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/using-the-url-rewrite-module/ and http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/461/creating-rewrite-rules-for-the-url-rewrite-module/. Hopefully they'll give you enough info to be able to get this working in IIS 7

Hey, I worked it out myself, without URL rewriting!
Inside RegisterRoutes() in Global.asax.cs:
routes.MapRoute("Services", "services/{action}/{*qualifier}",
new { controller = "Services", action = "Index", qualifier = UrlParameter.Optional });
// and other controllers that I want to work the normal way
routes.MapRoute("Default", "{*path}",
new { controller = "Go", action = "Index", path = UrlParameter.Optional });
And in my GoController class
public ActionResult Index(string path) { ... }
Works perfectly!

You could try adding a mapping that does "geography/{country}" and have it specify the controller manually and add the country as a parameter. I've seen it done to prevent things like "Dashboard/Dashboard" etc.
An example can be seen at Kazi Manzur Rashid's Blog - ASP.NET MVC Best Practices (Part 2) #15 for what I am describing.

Have you seen this: http://www.iridescence.no/post/Defining-Routes-using-Regular-Expressions-in-ASPNET-MVC.aspx ?

you could try mapping a route of "{action}/{id}" with a default set for the controller. But that'll also match anything of the form "{controller}/{action}" too - unless you can do some clever constraining.