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ASP.NET MVC Mulitlingual site not working properly

I'm working on a website that must be in both English and Spanish. I have used resx files and am adapting the culture setting based on the browser's language setting as the code below shows (this is on the global.asax.cs):
protected void Application_AcquireRequestState(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string culture = "en-US";
if (Request.UserLanguages != null)
{
culture = Request.UserLanguages[0];
}
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo(culture);
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo(culture);
}
This does work! However, the user should also be able to change the language. To accomplish this, so I created a CultureController as my code below shows, which is consumed by the site through a link:
public class CultureController : Controller
{
public ActionResult SetLanguage(string name)
{
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new System.Globalization.CultureInfo(name);
Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture;
System.Web.HttpContext.Current.Session["culture"] = name;
return RedirectToAction("Index", "Home");
}
}
And I have these links on my site:
<li>Español</li>
<li>English</li>
This does not work. It's weird, cause when I debug it the method is actually used and the data flow seems correct, it gets the name parameter and sets it, but after the redirection the language does not change and the requests are shown as failed. Do you have any suggestions what am I doing wrong?

Would using a different URL for the languages work?
I did that at a previous employer, so that we didn't have to change one's browser language in order to test the different languages, and also if that a user prefers one language over another (situationally) but their browser isn't configured correctly, they have control.
Example:
http://example.com/en/home vs http://example.com/es/home
I was able to use URL rewriting to extract that into a querystring parameter (quite unnecessary with MVC as you can use routing parameters)
You could quite easily add some code to detect browser language and redirect the user to the correct URL, and allow a cookie to override these preferences.
I'm aware that this is a vastly different answer than you were looking for, but it made it a snap to test ("/en/" was a hack we didn't actually set up per se; I just made it work so that we could debug the pages without having to translate the text.)
It was quite easy to throw up the 6 versions of the page in different tabs and check that everything looked correct. We had German and Chinese, and those are good test languages: German nouns get long, and it's very easy to determine if you missed translating any phrases with Chinese.

It seems you don't have route for localization.First you have to define routes like below.
routes.MapRoute(
name: "LocalizedDefault",
url: "{lang}/{controller}/{action}",
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index"},
constraints: new {lang="es-ES|fr-FR|en-US"}
);
routes.MapRoute(
name: "Default",
url: "{controller}/{action}",
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", lang = en-US }
);
After setting thread language you have to direct it with lang like below.
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.RedirectToRoute("LocalizedDefault",
new { lang=culture,
controller = filterContext.RouteData.Values["controller"],
action = filterContext.RouteData.Values["action"]
});
return;
For full implementation have a look at this article.

Change Controller and Action name according to language selected

I have a Controller with the name "Hem" and Action name is "Om".
And default language i have set Swedish.
So route will be on Swedish site, it's
/sv/Hem/Om
Now I want to change language to "en" by clicking English in language section.
So route will be set automatically like this way :
/en/Home/About
But functionality should be work of /sv/Hem/Om and In address bar should be display as /en/Home/About
Experts can you please help me out.

You can do this way.
routes.MapRoute(
"English route",
"en/{controller}/{action}/{id}"
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", language = "en" },
);
routes.MapRoute(
"FrenchHome",
"/sv/Hem/Om",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", language = "fr" }
);
or you can do that way:
public class GenericRoutes
{
public string Controller {get;set;}
public string Action {get;set;}
public string Url{get;set;}
public string RouteName{get;set;}
}
public List<GenericRoutes> Routes = new List<GenericRoutes>();
Routes.Add(new GenericRoutes{Cotroller="bl",Action="cl",Url="bl/cl"})
for(int i=0;i<Routes.count();i++)
{
routes.MapRoute(
Routes[i].RouteName,
Routes[i].Url,
new { controller = Routes[i].Controller, action = Routes[i].Action },
);
}

I personally would avoid this approach for multilingual sites. Yes it is technically possible to do what you are asking but most sites do not handle multiple languages in this way. ASP.net has had ability to localize pages for a long time and I would recommend this approach instead.
Localization involves putting resource keys in your view template instead of hard coding your strings. Then you would set the culture of your thread, usually by the http accept-language header and the site would chose the appropriate strings for that culture to put into the page view. The only thing you need to maintain then is sets of strings for each language.
The benefit for this approach is that you write your views only once. When you have 2 or even 3 sets of views you run the risk of having those versions of your site diverge. I personally have seen this happen and its a hard problem to get back from. Also you get to separate your "language problem" from whatever problem your website is solving, meaning your domain isn't cluttered with boilerplate code to maintain a fancy language switching technique, instead of going with the solution that's included with the platform.
If you are interested in doing multi-language sites in .net the right way I would recommend learning about Localization and Globalization, here is a good place to start :)
Beginners Tutorial
Scott Hanselman tutorial - MVC 3 + Jquery version

First of all, I am not an expert. But in order to route user to different controller you can implement custom routing and configure routes dynamically.
To understand how routing works you may consider checking this link out.
Here is a quick trick to do that:
Here is RegisterRoutes method which register all routes for application
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{}
now get current language from url(get first segment of url (en in your case))
query your data source for current language
add your routes here from database or any other source using foreach.
.
foreach (var route in RouteValues)
{
route.UniqueName,
routes.MapRoute("prefix/{controller}/{action}/{id},
new { controller = route.Controller , action = route.Action , id = route.Id });
}

Stackoverflow style URL (customising outgoing URL)

If I navigate to the following stackoverflow URL http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15532493 it is automatically appended with the title of the question like so:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15532493/mvc-custom-route-gives-404
That is, I can type the URL into my browser without the question title and it is appended automatically.
How would I go about achieving the same result in my application? (Note: I am aware that the question title doesn't affect the page that is rendered).
I have a controller called Users with an action method called Details. I have the following route defined:
routes.MapRoute("UserRoute",
"Users/{*domain}",
new { controller = "User", action = "Details" },
new { action = "^Details$" });
As this is an intranet application the user is authenticated against their Windows account. I want to append the domain and user name to the URL.
If I generate the URL in the view like so:
#Html.ActionLink("Model.UserName", "Details", "User", new { domain = Model.Identity.Replace("\\", "/") })
I get a URL that look like this:
Domain/Users/ACME/jsmith
However, if the user navigates to the URL Domain/Users/ by using the browsers navigation bar it matches the route and the user is taken to the user details page. I would like to append the ACME/jsmith/ onto the URL in this case.
The research I have done so far indicates I might have to implement a custom route object by deriving from RouteBase and implementing the GetRouteData and GetVirtualPath methods but I do not know where to start with this (the msdn documentaiton is very thin).
So what I would like to know is:
Is there a way of achieving this without implementing a custom route?
If not, does anyone know of any good resources to get me started implementing a custom route?
If a custom route implementation is required, how does it get at the information which presumably has to be loaded from the database? Is it OK to have a service make database calls in a route (which seems wrong to me) or can the information be passed to the route by the MVC framework?

It's actually pretty simple. Since the title is just there for SEO reasons you do not need to get to the actual question, so the Question controller (in SO case) will load the correct question based on the id (in the URL) and redirect the user with a 301 status code.
You can see this behavior with any web inspector

You could do it client-side with Javascript:
history.pushState({}, /* Title Here */, /* URL Here */ );
Only downside is not all browsers support it.

Asp.net MVC routing function

Can someone please explain what the following function does. I am learning Asp.net MVC and unable to understand which controller is called when and renders which view.
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
//register custom routes (plugins, etc)
var routePublisher = EngineContext.Current.Resolve<IRoutePublisher>();
routePublisher.RegisterRoutes(routes);
routes.MapRoute(
"Default", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
new[] { "Nop.Web.Controllers" }
);
}
This code is from nopCommerce source-code. I can't understand the URL routing for this project

The logic for this is in the System.Web.Mvc.MvcHandler class, the System.Web.Mvc.DefaultControllerFactory class, and the System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker class. .NET Reflector is your friend.
Basically, the MVC framework:
Uses reflection to get all the controllers in the application project.
Then it does something like IEnumerable<string> controllerNames = controllerTypes.Select(controllerType => controllerType.Name.Replace("Controller",string.Empty));. It then tries to match the first path segment, {controller}, to one of these sanitized controller type names (case-insensitive).
Then, it looks at this controller's public methods that have a return type that is of type ActionResult or some derivative. It matches the method name to the second path segment, {action}, as the action method to be called.
If the selected method has a parameter that is named id, then it matches the third path segment {id} to that value, and passes it to the method. Otherwise, the optional id parameter is ignored.
If the ActionResult type that is returned is a derivative of ViewResultBase then the IViewEngine tries to locate a corresponding view in the project using whatever conventions have been specified for that view engine. The WebFormViewEngine, for example, looks in the project for ~/Views/{controller}/{action}.ascx, ~/Views/{controller}/{action}.aspx, ~/Views/Shared/{action}.ascx, ~/Views/Shared/{action}.aspx by default.
If you want to further understand how routing works in MVC, I would highly suggest Scott Gu's article on MVC Routing.
As far as the IRoutePublisher method, that looks like a nopCommerce specific method that automatically registers additional routes specific to nopCommerce's configuration. If you are interested in how nopCommerce's specific routing conventions work, you can download the source code from the nopCommerce codeplex page and do a search for its default IRoutePublisher implementation.
Update The default IRoutePublisher is here: http://nopcommerce.codeplex.com/SourceControl/changeset/view/7e34dd9d98f3#src%2fPresentation%2fNop.Web.Framework%2fMvc%2fRoutes%2fRoutePublisher.cs . Basically, it gets all implementations of IRouteProvider and registers their route definitions in order according to their priority.
The default route providers are: Nop.Web.Infrastructure.RouteProvider and Nop.Web.Infrastructure.UpgradeRouteProvider

nopCommerce employs a loosely coupled infrastructure that registers routes for each plugin separately.
So If you need to understand what's going on, check the nopCommerce source code and look for RouteProvider classes, that each plugin has. They are dynamically loaded on application start.
If you need to create your own routes, you can still do that the traditional way -- but be aware, that there might be some clashes.
(Disclaimer: I just looked at the source code, don't know anything else about it).

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.