MVC Routing: How to map two names to one action

Question

I'd like to have one route that gives the option of two urls but maps to one action. A good example would be for multilingual application. Lets take english and french for example.

This seems simple at first, technically you can do:

routes.MapRoute(
  "the hi route english" ,
  "welcome/sayhi/{id}" ,
  new { controller = "Welcome" , action = "SayHi" , id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);

routes.MapRoute(
  "the hi route french" ,
  "bienvenu/direallo/{id}" ,
  new { controller = "Welcome" , action = "SayHi" , id = UrlParameter.Optional }
);

But that means that you'll have to define two routes for every action. Or a little better solution, create a custom Route class that takes more params to handle bilingualism.

If I go option 1 or 2, It means I have to define every single routes of the WelcomeController because I cannot use {action} in my route.

Ideally, i'd like to be able to define at least action name via metadata and then grab it via reflection or something.

i.e.:

[ActionName( { "fr", "direallo" }, {"en", "sayhi"})]
public ActionResult SayHi(string id){
     //check current thread culture...
}

I am not quite sure where to starts, any ideas? Tips?

Thank you,

Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2146227/how-to-route-a-multiple-language-url-with-a-mvc — Justin Pihony, Feb 24 '12 at 15:23
its pretty good, but I'm wondering if there is some way to avoid building a dictionary outside the controller. — Pierluc SS, Feb 24 '12 at 21:08
This is a configuration item in my opinion, and should be outside of the controller anyway. But that it just my two cents — Justin Pihony, Feb 24 '12 at 21:12

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

1

You have several options starting points here, roughly they are (in order of implementation complexity):

A route per language (as you outlined above)

A regex route constraint e.g.

routes.MapRoute(
    "the hi route",
    "{controllerName}/{actionName}/{id}",
    new { controller = "Welcome" , action = "SayHi" , id = UrlParameter.Optional },
    new { controllerName = @"welcome|bienvenu", actionName = @"sayhi|direallo" }
);

You could create a base controller, which is inherited by a subclass per language and define a language specific action name for each base controller action method
You could create your own (or use the one provided in the answer to the comment by Justin Pihony) custom routing constraint

edited May 23 '17 at 12:20

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answered Feb 24 '12 at 22:05

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If these are the only options, I guess last one remains the most elegant solution, and I already got it working :) – Pierluc SS Feb 27 '12 at 13:19
this gets tricky when you're domain defines the language you're in and then you have to add links depending on languages. – Pierluc SS Feb 28 '12 at 19:27

MVC Routing: How to map two names to one action

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