Switching to {controller}/{id}/{action} breaks RedirectToAction - asp.net

Question

I am trying to use proper REST urls with MVC. To do that I switched default Routing from:
{controller}/{action}/{id}
to
{controller}/{id}/{action}
so instead of:
/Customer/Approve/23
there is now
/Customer/23/Approve
ActionLink seems to work ok, but the following code in CustomerController:
[CustomAuthorize]
[HttpGet]
public ActionResult Approve(int id)
{
_customerService.Approve(id);
return RedirectToAction("Search"); //Goes to bad url
}
ends up on url /Customer/23/Search. While it should be going to /Customer/Search. Somehow it remembers 23 (id).
Here is my routing code in global.cs
routes.MapRoute(
"AdminRoute", // Route name
"{controller}/{id}/{action}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
new { id = new IsIntegerConstraint() }
);
routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" });
If I switch the two functions, RedirectToAction starts working, but using:
Html.ActionLink("Approve", "Approve", new { Id = 23})
Now generates /Customer/Approve?id=23, instead of /Customer/23/Approve.
I could specify direct urls like ~/Customer/23/Approve, instead of using ActionLink and RedirectToAction, but would rather stick to functions provided by MVC.

Answer 1

When you use RedirectToAction(), internally, MVC will take the existing route data (including the Id value) to build the url. Even if you pass a null RouteValueDictionary, the existing route data will be merged with the new empty route value data.
The only way around this I can see is to use RedirectToRoute(), as follows:
return RedirectToRoute("Default", new { controller = "Customer", action = "Search"});
counsellorben

Answer 2

Try passing in new (empty) RouteValueDictionary in your controller
return RedirectToAction("Search", new System.Web.Routing.RouteValueDictionary{});
And here:
Html.ActionLink("Approve", "Approve", new { Id = 23})
I don't even know how can it pick up the Customer controller, since you are not specifying it anywhere. Try providing both controller and action to ActionLink helper.

Answer 3

Try passing the current route data to methon in your controller action:
return RedirectToAction("Search", this.RouteData.Values);

Answer 4

Remove this part:
id = UrlParameter.Optional
may be resolve the problem; when you define "id" as an optional parameter, and you have the "Default" map, the "Default" and the "AdminRoute" are same together!
regards.

Answer 5

I was having a similar problem. Route values that were passed to my controller action were being reused when I tried to redirect the user with RedirectToAction, even if I didn't specify them in the new RouteValueDictionary. The solution that I came up with (after reading
counsellorben's post) with was to clear out the RouteData for the current request. That way, I could stop MVC from merging route values that I didn't specify.
So, in your situation maybe you could do something like this:
[CustomAuthorize]
[HttpGet]
public ActionResult Approve(int id)
{
_customerService.Approve(id);
this.RouteData.Values.Clear(); //clear out current route values
return RedirectToAction("Search"); //Goes to bad url
}

Answer 6

I had a similar problem and was able to solve it by adding the id to the default route as well.
routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });
If there is truly no id in your default route then you could also try:
routes.MapRoute(
"Default",
"{controller}/{action}",
new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = string.Empty });