ASP.NET MVC5 Customised Inbound Routing - asp.net

Question

I'm "playing" around with custom inbound URL routing and have came across a problem.
When I pass my custom route a URL to examine, that ends in *.+, my class is not fired when i submit the request.
An example URL would be "~/old/windows.html"
When I step through this in the debugger, my RouteBase implementation doesn't fire. If i edit the url that i pass to the constructor of my route to try to match against "~/old/windows", my implemetation is fired as expected.
Again, If i change the url ro examine to "~/old/windows." the problem reoccurs.
My Route Implementation is below :-
public class LegacyRoute : RouteBase
{
private string[] _urls;
public LegacyRoute(string[] targetUrls)
{
_urls = targetUrls;
}
public override RouteData GetRouteData(HttpContextBase httpContext)
{
RouteData result = null;
string requestedURL = httpContext.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath;
if (_urls.Contains(requestedURL, StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase))
{
result = new RouteData(this, new MvcRouteHandler());
result.Values.Add("controller", "Legacy");
result.Values.Add("action","GetLegacyURL");
result.Values.Add("legacyURL", requestedURL);
}
return result;
}
public override VirtualPathData GetVirtualPath(RequestContext requestContext, RouteValueDictionary values)
{
return null;
}
}
In the RoutesConfig file I have registered my route like so :-
routes.MapMvcAttributeRoutes();
routes.Add(new LegacyRoute(new[]{"~/articles/windows.html","~/old/.Net_1.0_Class_Library"}));
Can anyone point out why there is a problem?

Answer 1

By default, the .html extension is not handled by .NET, it is handled by IIS directly. You can override by adding the following section in Web.config under <system.webServer> -
<handlers>
<add name="HtmlFileHandler" path="*.html" verb="GET" type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
</handlers>
As pointed out here. The above will route EVERY .html file request to .NET, you might want to be more specific by providing a more complete path if you don't want your routing to handle every .html file.

Answer 2

I've found the problem, and I'm sure this will help out a lot of fellow developers.
The problem is with IIS Express that is running via Visual Studio.
There is a module configured in the applicationhost.config called :-
UrlRoutingModule-4.0
This is how it looks in file :-
<add name="UrlRoutingModule-4.0" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule" preCondition="managedHandler,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
You need to set the preCondition Parameter to "".
To do this :-
Run you app via Visual Studio
Right click on IIS Express in your system tray, select "Show All Applications"
Click on the project you wish to edit, then click the config URL.
Open the file with Visual Studio, Locate the module and ammend.
Hope this helps anyone else, who ran into a similar problem.