Am I approaching routes in my application wrong? - asp.net

Question

I'm working on my first ASP.NET MVC 3 application and I've got a couple of actions defined to handle adding/removing an ice cream from a menu. They look like so:
[HttpPost]
public PartialViewResult AddMenuIceCreamMapping(int iceCreamId, int menuId)
[HttpPost]
public PartialViewResult RemoveMenuIceCreamMapping(int iceCreamId, int menuId)
In order for these actions to not result in a 404 error, I went into the Global.asax.cs file and added the following:
routes.MapRoute(
"AddMenuIceCreamMapping", // Route name
"IceCream/AddMenuIceCreamMapping/{iceCreamId}/{menuId}", // URLwith parameters
new
{
controller = "IceCream",
action = "AddMenuIceCreamMapping",
iceCreamId = UrlParameter.Optional,
menuId = UrlParameter.Optional
}
);
routes.MapRoute(
"RemoveMenuIceCreamMapping", // Route name
"IceCream/RemoveMenuIceCreamMapping/{iceCreamId}/{menuId}", // URLwith parameters
new
{
controller = "IceCream",
action = "RemoveMenuIceCreamMapping",
iceCreamId = UrlParameter.Optional,
menuId = UrlParameter.Optional
}
);
and those work, meaning I can click an Add or Remove button on my page and add or remove an ice cream/menu mapping. Great. But I'm expecting that there will be more situations like this and I can see this routes container having more entries such as these. And to my novice web programmer eye, it seems a bit clunky and I begin to think that perhaps I'm going about this the wrong way. Am I? Is there a better way to approach this so that I don't end up doing the "go create some action that takes N parameters and then go add a route" thing. Any suggestions here?

Answer 1

You can use placeholders in your mappings to deal with this... Instead of what you've got above, you could use this (note that I don't specify a default):
routes.MapRoute(
"TwoParameterRoute", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}/{id1}/{id2}", // URL with parameters
);
And if you have to add a route that takes three parameters, you extend the idea:
routes.MapRoute(
"ThreeParameterRoute", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}/{id1}/{id2}/{id3}" // URL with parameters
);
In a controller for the two parameter route, the code would look like this (for a contrived sample):
public ActionResult Index(int id1, int id2)
{
ViewData["id1"] = id1;
ViewData["id2"] = id2;
return View();
}
One final thing to note is that you can change the naming to match a pattern you might have. In the first example, instead of id1 and id2 you might have entityId and relatedId or something similar.

Answer 2

You know that you can also use querystring parameters even with POST requests? Using just the default route (that comes with new ASP.NET MVC projects), you can reach your actions with /IceCream/AddMenuIceCreamMapping/?iceCreamId=1&menuId=1 and /IceCream/RemoveMenuIceCreamMapping/?iceCreamId=1&menuId=1.
Using querystringparameters also show that this url is a parameterized method call, and not a reference to a resource, as the original URLs would indicate.

Answer 3

If your set of CRUD actions will be repeating with every custom Entity that you introduce in your application, then you can have the controller as a parameter too. As it is now, you have controller fixed. Also I would avoid such long action names. I would also avoid spelling Icecream as IceCream. Just coz of its looks.
Probably you should have a controller Menu, which handles Icecreams. It kinda doesn't make sense that Icecream handles its own things because it is a part of something else.
Such as
routes.MapRoute(
"RemoveIcecreamFromMenu", // Route name
"menu/remove-icecream/{iceCreamId}/{menuId}", // URLwith parameters
new
{
controller = "Menu",
action = "RemoveIcecream",
iceCreamId = UrlParameter.Optional, // i don't think those two should be optional
menuId = UrlParameter.Optional
}
);
But it makes sense for an Icecream controller to handle its own CRUD:
routes.MapRoute(
"CreateIcecream", // Route name
"icecream/create", // URLwith parameters
new
{
controller = "Icecream",
action = "Create"
}
);
routes.MapRoute(
"DeleteIcecream", // Route name
"icecream/delete/{id}", // URLwith parameters
new
{
controller = "Icecream",
action = "Delete",
id = #"\d+" // this tells the routing engine only integer are accepted
}
);

Answer 4

I would go with something that had descriptive urls and no default route:
routes.MapRoute(
"IceCreamEdit", // Route name
"{controller}/{action}/icecream/{iceCreamId}/menu/{menuId}" // URLwith parameters
);