Auto-Discovery of Routes

If your app is large, you don't want to register your routes one by one. Also, the names and hierarchy of pages in your app typically correspond with the URLs you want to use. In this case, you can use the auto-discovery mechanism.

Consider the following files in the project and the URLs you want to map:

In this case the auto-discovery will be registered like this:

config.RouteTable.AutoDiscoverRoutes(new DefaultRouteStrategy(config));

The DefaultRouteStrategy browses the Views folder and looks for all .dothtml files (including the subfolders). When it finds a file, it generates the route name and URL from the relative path of the file in the Views folder.

If you need to do some changes to the default strategy, you can create your own class and override one of the following methods: GetRouteName, GetRouteUrl and GetRouteDefaultParameters. Each of these methods is called for every discovered .dothtml file before the route is registered.

public class MyRouteStrategy : DefaultRouteStrategy
{

    protected override string GetRouteUrl(RouteStrategyMarkupFileInfo file)
    {
        var url = base.GetRouteUrl(file);
        if (url == "contact-us") 
        {
            // the contact-us route should have a parameter
            return url + "/{ContactReason}";
        }
        else if (url == "home") 
        {
            // instead of /home, we need the route to be directly in the website root /
            return "";
        }
    }

}

One of the interesting scenarios is building your own naming conventions. For example, if the page name ends with List, it won't have any route parameters. If it ends with Detail, it will have one route parameter called id.

public class MyRouteStrategy : DefaultRouteStrategy
{

    protected override string GetRouteUrl(RouteStrategyMarkupFileInfo file)
    {
        var url = base.GetRouteUrl(file);
        if (url.EndsWith("detail", StringComparison.CurrentCultureIgnoreCase)) 
        {
            // add "id" parameter to the route
            return url + "/{id}";
        }
    }

}