Multi-lingual websites with ASP.NET MVC

Question

When building a multi-lingual website (with ASP.NET web forms), I'll use an HTTP module to rewrite the URLs to end up with something friendly (for humans & search engines) like:

uk/products/product_category_one/sub_category_one/index.aspx
uk/products/product_category_one/sub_category_one/widget_mk5.aspx
es/productos/categoría_de_producto_una/widget_mk5.aspx

My (newbie) understanding of MVC is that the URL should take the format of

Controller / Action / Identifier

so replicating the functionality above with MVC will end up with URLs similar to:

products/category/123/product_category_one/sub_category_one
products/items/456/widget_mk5

Questions..

• Can I insert a country code into the URL before the 'controller' segment?
• Is it possible to map 'products' and 'productos' to the same controller?

Thanks for your help

Edit: In addition to Panos' answer below I found more information on the ASP.NET Website.

Answer 1

The URL can take almost any other form you like. For more info, check ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing. Just for starting (since I am not sure if it is the optimum solution), you can add two new routes in your global.asax:

        routes.MapRoute(
            "ukRoute",
            "{lang}/Products/{action}/{id}/{subcategory}",
            new { lang = "uk", controller = "Products", action = "Index", id = "", subcategory = "" }
        );
        routes.MapRoute(
            "esRoute",
            "{lang}/Productos/{action}/{id}/{subcategory}",
            new { lang = "es", controller = "Products", action = "Index", id = "", subcategory = "" }
        );

These routes understand the following URLs (and map both of them to the ActionResult Category(string id, string subcategory) method of ProductsController):

uk/Products/Category/1/A
es/Productos/Category/1/A

If you want to create such URLs in your views you can use something like:

<%= Html.RouteLink("English 1.A", "ukRoute", new { lang = "uk", action = "Category", id = "1", subcategory = "A" })%>
<%= Html.RouteLink("Spanish 1.A", "esRoute", new { lang = "es", action = "Category", id = "1", subcategory = "A" })%>

Answer 2

You can do this, but keep in mind that not all countries are languages. For example, en-gb is the usual representation for British English, or more specifically, the Great Britain locale for English content, for example. If you can, it's worth following the RFC1766-derived conventions for language-LOCALE.

Search engines actually tend to do a fairly good job dealing with content-negotiation, by the way, so you need not necessarily have separate URIs for the same content in different languages. Google Japan will crawl with ja-JP as the accept language header, for example.