One of the benefits to using ActionLink is so that I can change the format of my URL and have all my links update automatically, I get that. 

But if I have "[controller]/[action]/[id]" setup as a route and use

    Html.ActionLink("Something", new { action = "Edit", controller = "Products", id = p.productid }) 

then I change the route to "[controller]/[action]/[productname]" this won't render correctly because ActionLink doesn't know how to set "productname".

 Am I missing something or am I to add every property to the anonymous object? And if so, what happens if I add properties to the Products class?

 Can I pass in the object and have the ActionLink automatically set fields in the URL to corresponding properties in the object?

 If I can't and I wanted to add this functionality, would I create a RouteHandler or would this be a helper method issue?

Thanks.

Gabe
 

 It's a syntactic thing and you're correct - if you specify "productname" in your Route you need to pass a variable named "productname". So you'd need to update your link thus:

 Html.ActionLink("Link", new{action="Edit", controller="Products",productname="Chang's Ice Tea"})

But that might not be the best way to do it. You can also rewrite this link:

Html.ActionLink<ProductController>(x=>x.Edit(p.ProductName))

The benefit here is that you get a compiler error that complains if you're not passing the right data.

 

So I guess my question now would be: is the URL creation done in the helper or the routehandler?

It's actually done via the Route object, which the helper uses. The Route instance is part of the url routing set of classes. When you try to generate a route url, we look at which routes you've configured match the parameters you specify and we generate the first one that matches.