Routing without controller and action in the url

Question

How do I configure ASP.NET MVC 3 routing so it doesn’t require the controller and action in the url?

I have this to display the details for item “abc123”, configured with the default routing-settings:

mysite.com/Home/Details/abc123

The value "abc123" is a unique value which the Home controller uses to look up the correct item in a database.

But I would prefer to have these ultra-short urls instead:

mysite.com/abc123

The site will also have very few additional controllers, such as “About” and “Contact”. I assume I would have to configure those specifically as well, so the default controller doesn’t start looking for details for an item with ID “About” or “Contact”. How do I do that?

UPDATE:

Here's what my routes ended up looking like:

routes.MapRoute("About", "About", New With {.controller = "About", .action = "Index"})
routes.MapRoute("ID", "{id}", New With {.controller = "Home", .action = "Details"})
routes.MapRoute("Default", "", New With {.controller = "Home", .action = "Index"})

:)

Answer 1

Try something like this:

routes.MapRoute("Site"
              , "Site/{controller}/{action}"
                , new { controller = "Home", action = "Index"});

routes.MapRoute("Id"
              , "{id}"
                , new { controller = "Home", action = "Details"});

The first route should ensure that you can have /Site/About and /Site/Contact mapped to AboutController and ContactController respectively. It is important that this gets mapped first.

The second route will make sure that /abc123 gets mapped to the details action with id "abc123"