asp mvc using dashes in controller names and routing?

Question

i have two questions. i'm fairly new to MVC and love the new way the controller and views are set up, but i can't figure out how to do the following:

1) make a url like www.homepage.com/coming-soon

for this type of url what is the right way to do it? do you create a controller named ComingSoonController and somehow magically insert a dash via routing? note i do NOT want underscores as that's not in the best interest of SEO. or is coming-soon some action name on some other controller that is not in the URL and use the [ActionName("name-with-dash")] attribute?

2) facebook, linkedin and twitter have urls like www.facebook.com/[profile name]. how would this be done in MVC? obviously the [profile name] is dynamic. and the code would obviously live in a controller called, say, profiles. so it seems to me that you would have to make MVC smart enough to know when that second part of the URL is a profile name and NOT a controller, and route it to the right action on the profiles controller? is this easier than it sounds?

Answer 1

1) It depends if coming-soon is dynamic part or not. I'll presume it is and would suggest something like this:

Global.asax

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
 routes.MapRoute(
                "Page", // Route name
                "{pageName}", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Home", action = "Page"} // Parameter defaults
             );

}

public class HomeController : Controller
{

 public ActionResult Page(string pageName)
 {
  return View();
 }
}

2) You can resolve this same way as I've shown above, but keep in mind that order of routes is important. And that first one that matches wins. If you want two actions that have different logic but similar url structure www.mysite.com/coming-soon and www.mysite.com/{profile name}, presuming that first url has static part and the later dynamic you could do something like this:

Global.asax

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
 routes.MapRoute(
                "Coming-soon", // Route name
                "coming-soon", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Home", action = "ComingSoon" } // Parameter defaults
             );

 routes.MapRoute(
                "Profiles", // Route name
                "{profileName}", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Home", action = "Profile"} // Parameter defaults
            );
}

public class HomeController : Controller
{
 public ActionResult ComingSoon()
 {
  return View();
 }

 public ActionResult Profile(string profileName)
 {
  return View();
 }

}

Answer 2

You could create a custom route handler be allow hyphens in the urls:

Create a new handler

public class HyphenatedRouteHandler : MvcRouteHandler{
        protected override IHttpHandler  GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext)
        {
            requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"] = requestContext.RouteData.Values["controller"].ToString().Replace("-", "_");
            requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"] = requestContext.RouteData.Values["action"].ToString().Replace("-", "_");
            return base.GetHttpHandler(requestContext);
        }
    }

...and the new route:

routes.Add(
            new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", 
                new RouteValueDictionary(
                    new { controller = "Default", action = "Index", id = "" }),
                    new HyphenatedRouteHandler())
        );

MVC Hyphenated urls