ASP.NET MVC 5: Define route order across controllers (RouteAttribute)

Question

The RouteAttribute("abc", Order = 2) ordering only seems to be respected within a controller: when the following methods are defined in the same controller I get the expected behavior, i.e., Method1 takes priority, Method2 is never invoked.

[Route("abc", Order = 1)]
public ActionResult Method1() { ... }

[Route("abc", Order = 2)]
public ActionResult Method2() { ... }

If I define those methods in two separate controllers I get an ambiguous route exception: InvalidOperationException: Multiple controller types were found that match the URL. This can happen if attribute routes on multiple controllers match the requested URL.

Is it possible to define the order across controllers using attribute routing?

Edit 1: It seems that even routes that would have an implicit ordering within one controller are ambiguous when spread over multiple controllers. The following would be okay within one controller (literal before wildcard), but throws an exception if placed into different controllers.

[Route("details/abc")]
[Route("details/{product}")]

This makes me that it is by design to keep controllers focused and force similar routes to be defined in the same controller.

Edit 2:

These are the routes I actually want to use. I want to put them into different controllers, because they do different things. They differ by the prefix.

[Route("reactive/monitor")]
[Route("{tier}/monitor")]

Your attempt to address an ordering issue across multiple controllers is strange. The same route can exist in two controllers and have two perfectly legal URIs without any complaint from .Net or a consumer of the service. Can you explain to us what cross-controller problem you're trying to fix? — Colorado Matt, Aug 10 '15 at 19:18

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 19 '15 at 14:59

You have no constraints upon the route parameters, for your second route. If you were to define the route as [Route("{tier:int}/monitor")] you might not have the ambiguity. Alternatively, you can add a regex to the routes, to make them exclusive, something like {tier:regex(^(?!reactive))?} would let you resolve this.

ASP.NET MVC 5: Define route order across controllers (RouteAttribute)

1 Answers1