Tips for formatted urls in asp.net mvc

It wasn't long ago that applications built using Microsoft tools had some pretty unfriendly url's as standard (if you've used Webforms or "Classic ASP" you know what I'm talking about).

This was due to IIS' obsession with handler mappings and probably the general feeling that Webforms wasn't really suited for the Internet and therefore the benefits of better url's such as SEO were not as important. I suspect that back in the day, the Internet also wasn't as competitive for search rankings.

Yes - as with most things - there were ways around it. Personally, I used Helicon's ISAPIRewrite to make IIS behave a little bit more like Apache and have a more robust abstraction between the url that the user sees and the physical file that is serving the request.

With the release of ASP.NET MVC and IIS 7, extensionless urls were introduced as a first-class feature and seeing .aspx everywhere was a thing of the past. Unfortunately, you can still spot an MVC application in the wild because of the upper-case characters - it's not quite as easy as spotting a Webforms application (view-source, CTRL-f, viewstate) but it bothers me nonetheless.

This is a class I have used on a ton of projects to format the route as I think it should be:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web.Mvc;
using System.Web.Routing;

namespace Core.Mvc
{
    public class FormattedRoute : Route
    {
        private readonly List<string> _formatExclusions = new List<string>();

        public FormattedRoute(string url, object defaults, object constraints = null, IEnumerable<string> formatExclusions = null, object dataTokens = null) :
            this(url, defaults, new MvcRouteHandler(), constraints, formatExclusions, dataTokens)
        {
        }

        public FormattedRoute(string url, object defaults, IRouteHandler routeHandler, object constraints = null, IEnumerable<string> formatExclusions = null, object dataTokens = null) :
            base(url, new RouteValueDictionary(defaults), new RouteValueDictionary(constraints), new RouteValueDictionary(dataTokens), routeHandler)
        {
            if (formatExclusions != null)
                _formatExclusions.AddRange(formatExclusions);
        }

        public override VirtualPathData GetVirtualPath(RequestContext requestContext, RouteValueDictionary values)
        {
            foreach (var routeValue in requestContext.RouteData.Values)
            {
                if (_formatExclusions.Contains(routeValue.Key, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase)) continue;

                if (values[routeValue.Key] != null)
                    values[routeValue.Key] = values[routeValue.Key].ToString().ToLowerInvariant();
            }

            return base.GetVirtualPath(new RequestContext(requestContext.HttpContext, new RouteData()), values);
        }
    }
}

To use it, you would bootstrap the route from your Global.asax.cs file as follows:

routes.Add(new FormattedRoute("{controller}/{action}/{id}",
  new { controller = ControllerNames.Home, action = ActionNames.Default, id = UrlParameter.Optional }));

The custom route accepts much the same parameters as the default route or MapRoute call.

A key feature is the "formatExclusions" parameter which allows you to opt-out of the formatting on a key-by-key basis. Typically, this is used for proper-names so generated url's preserve the capitalisation.

An example of such a route is as follows:

    routes.Add(new FormattedRoute("p/{manufacturer}/{sku}/{productId}",
        new { controller = ControllerNames.Product, action = ActionNames.Default }, 
            constraints: null,
            formatExclusions: new[] {"manufacturer", "sku" }));

In this case, only the product id route value will be modified.

If you're wondering what the "ControllerNames" or "ActionNames" classes are - they are only constants which map to the real controller names. I find this gives a bit of extra compile-time assistance if I rename something and allows me to abstract the controller class names even further.