R – ASP.Net MVC Routing – using same pattern for different controllers

asp.net-mvcrouting

Say I have an ASP.Net MVC site with products and categories, and I want these urls…

Products:

Fruitshop.com/super-tasty-apple
Fruitshop.com/squishy-orange
Fruitshop.com/worm-infested-apple
Fruitshop.com/megaorange

Categories:

Fruitshop.com/apples
Fruitshop.com/oranges

For each product/category in the database, I save the slug (or whatever you call it), like "super-delicous-apple" or "apples".

There is no pattern or regular expression(that I can see, anyway), that allow me to determine just by looking at the url, if it is a product or a category. I need to look in the database to know.

What would be a good way to approach this?

At application startup, register the route of every single product and category
Create some code that handles the requests, and look up the slug in the database
??

Nevermind caching, refreshing routing-table etc for now. 🙂

Feel free to edit my question title, if you feel there is a more appropriate title for this question – this was the best I could come up with.

Best Answer

I like your approach #2 more so than #1. I think you could get away with creating a single route that goes to a SlugHandler action in a SlugController (or whatever else you want to call these). You would need only one route for this.

Your SlugHandler action would then accept a slug string, then call upon a method to determine whether the slug is a category or a product. (You did say these were unique, yes? i.e., not possible to have same slug for BOTH a product and a category.) From there, you could call upon the appropriate Product or Category action method, passing along the slug string.

Some code fragments follow:

internal enum SlugType
{
    Category,
    Product
}

private SlugType DetermineSlugTypeFromSlugName(string slug)
{
    // some database magic happens here to return appropriate SlugType
}

public ActionResult SlugHandler(string slug)
{
    SlugType slugType = DetermineSlugTypeFromSlugName(slug);
    switch (slugType)
    {
        case SlugType.Category:
            return Category(slug);
        case SlugType.Product:
            return Product(slug);
        default:
            return SomeErrorAction();
    }
}

Best of luck!
-Mike

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

C# – How to create a dropdownlist from an enum in ASP.NET MVC

For MVC v5.1 use Html.EnumDropDownListFor

@Html.EnumDropDownListFor(
    x => x.YourEnumField,
    "Select My Type", 
    new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC v5 use EnumHelper

@Html.DropDownList("MyType", 
   EnumHelper.GetSelectList(typeof(MyType)) , 
   "Select My Type", 
   new { @class = "form-control" })

For MVC 5 and lower

I rolled Rune's answer into an extension method:

namespace MyApp.Common
{
    public static class MyExtensions{
        public static SelectList ToSelectList<TEnum>(this TEnum enumObj)
            where TEnum : struct, IComparable, IFormattable, IConvertible
        {
            var values = from TEnum e in Enum.GetValues(typeof(TEnum))
                select new { Id = e, Name = e.ToString() };
            return new SelectList(values, "Id", "Name", enumObj);
        }
    }
}

This allows you to write:

ViewData["taskStatus"] = task.Status.ToSelectList();

by using MyApp.Common