Is ASP.NET Core Minimal API beginning forward slash a must?

Question

Is there any difference between:

1. app.MapGroup("") vs app.MapGroup("/")
2. app.MapGet("task") vs app.MapGet("/task")

When I did tests, they looked no different. Just want to confirm. If they are the same, why do we add the "/"?

Answer 1

Always take an initiative and dive in the source code =). When you have a challenge or need to understand why something works some way.

The difference is that if you append a "/" for anything calling MapMethods i.e MapGroup,MapGet, MapPost,MapPatch...etc.It will be trimmed.

The RoutePatternFactoryClass will trim it under the hood i.e the first "/" or these two characters "~/" (with RoutePatternParser under method TrimPrefix()) the resultant string will be taken as the route pattern.

why do we add the "/"?

I would guess majorly because of the templates we just adopt it not questioning why? ,from examining source I see this will be an overhead (though minimal and trivial), I would just skip those characters and put my intended path i.e .MapGet("task").