Localizing/translating routes in ASP.NET MVC

Question

Anyone knows a nice solution to localize routes in ASP.NET MVC? What I'd like to achieve is that these two urls point to the same action/resource:

• http://example.org/Products/Categories (en)
• http://example.org/Produkte/Kategorien (de)

Also there should be the possibility to generate the routes according to the current culture (or the default, if there are no translations available). Alternately, if I was able to specify just one culture so that only one of the two links above would work, that'd be also viable.

I tried a very nice approach by Maarten Balliauw, but his solution unfortunately doesn't work with Html.RenderAction(...).

Of course I could just add routes for all translations like

routes.MapRoute(
    "Products_Categories",
    "Produkte/Kategorien",
    new { controller = "Products", action = "Categories" }
);

but that would end up in an enormous amount of routes and it'd be very unflexible. Any better solution would be appreciated :-) The more flexible the better.

Answer 1

You can try the awesome AttributeRouting project that I just found! You can get it through NuGet.

Answer 2

This might be a viable way to manage all your routes - or some variation of it such as defining the routes in an XML file

http://www.iansuttle.com/blog/post/ASPNET-MVC-Store-Routes-in-the-Database.aspx

you'll still end up with a large number of routes but managing them would be a hell of a lot easier

Answer 3

A simple solution for both attribute and conventional-based routing can be found at https://github.com/boudinov/mvc-5-routing-localization

You can get these working with /de prefix, as it is the preferred schema. You need to have 'Products' and 'Categories' translated to German in a resource file:

• http://example.org/Products/Categories

• http://example.org/de/Produkte/Kategorien

  [LocalizedRoute("~/Products/Categories", translateUrl: true]
  ActionResult Index(...)
  

Or working answer to the original question, without the language prefix, you can get like this:

• http://example.org/Products/Categories

• http://example.org/Produkte/Kategorien

  [LocalizedRoute("~/Products/Categories", translateUrl: false, explicitCulture: "en")]
  [LocalizedRoute("~/Produkte/Kategorien", translateUrl: false, explicitCulture: "de")]
  ActionResult Index(...)