R – Mixing ASP.NET MVC into ASP.NET WebForms

asp.netasp.net-mvcasp.net-mvc-routingiis

For some reason my routing is ignoring any attempt to access my MVC pages and simply giving me 404s. I have a WebForms app set up like the following:

Virtual Directory: thing

So I usually access my site like so:

The original stucture of my ASP.NET WebForms app mirrors the file system so I have folders full of .aspx files and I need to be able to use them like that. For some reason when I try to access a page using the MVC routing such as:

http://localhost/thing/Home/Index

I just get a 404 error. I have used ASP.NET MVC on it's own and I know that even if I didn't set up my folders properly, I wouldn't get a 404. I would get the reasons why the page couldn't be found and hints to where the files should be. Below is my routing info. Where am I going wrong?

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.aspx/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.MapRoute(
       "Default",
        // Route name
       "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
        // URL with parameters
       new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
        // Parameter defaults
     );
}

protected void Application_Start()
{
    RegisterRoutes(RouteTable.Routes);
}

Best Answer

Can you tell me what OS you're running on and whether this site is running under VS.NET Web Dev server or IIS?

Routing in MVC directs a request to a Controller class and then a specific Action method. Do you have a class named HomeController with a method named Index?

Assuming you had a controller that looked this this...

public class HomeController : Controller
{
    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        return View();
    }
}

... then the url you mentioned should work. However, ASP.NET MVC will expect to find any views associated with the Home controller in a folder named Views\Home or Views\Shared under your vdir. In this case, for the Index action, it will expect to find a view named Index.aspx (or .ascx). However, a missing view doesn't usually result in 404 - that's usually caused by the controller not being found, the action method not being found, or on IIS 6 the asp.net pipeline not being in the wildcard settings for the vdir.

update:

Are you sure your web.config has the MVC HttpHandler in place (so that MVC is in the ASP.NET pipeline). You should have something like this...

<add verb="*" path="*.mvc" validate="false" type="System.Web.Mvc.MvcHttpHandler, System.Web.Mvc, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>

... in your httpHandlers section and this...

<add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule, System.Web.Routing, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>

... in your 'httpModules' section of web.config.

update 2:

Based upon your comments I suspect you've not got the ASP.NET MVC code in the pipeline. You should take your web.config and compare it with one from a freshly created MVC site and look for the missing config items. I've suggested a couple above, but there might be more.

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