Troubleshooting odd behavior with custom route where Controller name is hidden in url

Let's say I have a simple mvc site with one controller.

Let's say I have a route in global.asax where I do not want the controller name to be shown in the url, like so:

routes.MapRoute(
"Puppies",
"Puppies/{number}",
new { controller = "PuppyController", action = "Puppies", number = UrlParameter.Optional }
);

...

//default route below

So the url is www.mywebsite.com/Puppies.

Let's say I want to have a link back to this puppies page from another page on the website, like so:

@Html.ActionLink("Click here to see puppies!", "Puppies")

Locally, using the built-in VS debugger, this works just fine.

On windows 2008 server with IIS 7, the link always takes me to:

http://www.mywebsite.com/PuppiesController/Puppies

and throws a 404.

Meanwhile, entering http://mywebsite.com/Puppies as the url on the server will bring up the page fine.

Any and all suggestions are welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Re: Troubleshooting odd behavior with custom route where Controller name is hidden in url

ka11isto

On windows 2008 server with IIS 7, the link always takes me to:

http://www.mywebsite.com/PuppiesController/Puppies

Never seen this. What version of MVC do you have?

Re: Troubleshooting odd behavior with custom route where Controller name is hidden in url

Thanks ignatandrei. We're using MVC 3 :/

Re: Troubleshooting odd behavior with custom route where Controller name is hidden in url

Strange. You have latest version of all.

Is your site public on internet ( it will be easiear to test)?

What's the URL of the page and what's the precise generated html?

Re: Troubleshooting odd behavior with custom route where Controller name is hidden in url

In your route you are referencing the controller as PuppyController, you shouldn't include the "Controller" part because that's only relevant to the class name. You want the route name instead which is the name of the controller minus "Controller" so in your case the route name would be Puppy.

Try changing your route to the following:

routes.MapRoute(
  "Puppies",
  "Puppies/{number}",
  new { controller = "Puppy", action = "Puppies", number = UrlParameter.Optional }
);

Edit: Also, install glimpse and enable it on the server, that way you can see what routes are being hit and it will help you debug the issue
http://getglimpse.com/

In addition to glimpse the mvc route debugger really helps
http://haacked.com/archive/2008/03/13/url-routing-debugger.aspx

Re: Troubleshooting odd behavior with custom route where Controller name is hidden in url

Hi CodeHobo,

That was an error just in this example I made up, in the real code I did not include the "Controller" part, and was still getting this behavior. Good catch though.

Re: Troubleshooting odd behavior with custom route where Controller name is hidden in url

Hmm ok. Can we see the complete route table and action method?

Re: Troubleshooting odd behavior with custom route where Controller name is hidden in url

You problem seems strange, I guess there are something wrong in your "Puppies" action, could you show it to us?

And have a look at this blog: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/03/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-2-url-routing.aspx

Hope this helpful
Regards
Young Yang