ServiceStack DefaultRedirectPath not triggering

Question

I'm using ServiceStack in an MVC4, VS2012 project running on windows7. I'm attempting to call a default "/search" route when the application loads. To do this I have the following code in my AppHost Configure method

Plugins.Add(new RazorFormat());

SetConfig(new EndpointHostConfig
        {
            ServiceStackHandlerFactoryPath = "api",
            DefaultRedirectPath = "/search"
        });

If I call this route directly (via /api/search) it works correctly. However when I run my project I simply get a HTTP Error 403.14 - Forbidden error. It's appears to be attempting to locate a static source document from the website root (I've removed all of these) rather than the dynamic route specified in DefaultRedirectPath

I've also added a HttpHandler via the CatchAllHandlers method to see if the route is being attempted but it appears the DefaultRedirect is simply not happening.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. From everything I've read this should just work.

Answer 1

I'm assuming that you've set up your /api path correctly in web.config too.

DefaultRedirectPath is just a simple redirect used when you request the root of your API (i.e. "/api"). It literally returns a 302 with your DefaultRedirectPath as the Location header (combined with the application root URL, if your ASP.NET application isn't at the root of the server). In other words, it's not a "route", just a relative URL. And in your case, it will redirect to /search in the root of your application, not to /api/search.

It should work, if you use DefaultRedirectPath = "/api/search".

However, when ServiceStack isn't at the root of the website, it will use MetadataRedirectPath first, and only if that is null or empty, DefaultRedirectPath. So you'll need to set MetadataRedirectPath to null, if this is what you want.

As for your test with CatchAllHandlers, as far as I can tell, CatchAllHandlers will actually cause your DefaultRedirect to not be used - the CatchAllHandler will be used as a handler, and the DefaultRedirectHandler that does the DefaultRedirectPath redirect won't ever come into play.

That will take care of redirecting from "/api" to "/api/search".

MVC is in control of your root url - the "api" addition to web.config and AppHost.Config does exactly that - keep ServiceStack only in control of "/api", while letting MVC take care of the rest. So, with that setup, if you want a redirect from "/" to "/api/search", you'd need to do it in the MVC home controller.