How to do Basecamp-style accounts in Asp.Net Mvc?

Question

For an Asp.Net software as a service application, I want to do account based subdomains like Basecamp and the rest of the 37Signals products have. E.g. acme.myapp.com will load the account for that customer and pull back only their information.

This is easy to do in Ruby on Rails, but how would you handle this functionality in ASP.NET MVC and be able to scale to possibly hundreds of accounts?

Answer 1

It's not very different compared to RoR. Just get the HTTP-Request, take the Host-Value, split it (at each dot) and take the first part to get the subdomain.

string subdomain = requestContext.HttpContext.
                      Request.Headers["Host"].Split('.')[0];

Then just resolve the subdomain to the Companies account.

Answer 2

Maarten Balliauw's blog covered one method extending RouteBase. I think I've also seen a custom route handler used for this.

Also, this StackOverflow question covered the same question, using a more simplistic approach.

I definitely recommend factoring this code out into the routing side rather than embedding the logic to get domain information in your controllers.

Answer 3

We use:

public static string GetSubDomain()
        {
            string subDomain = String.Empty;

            if (HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.HostNameType == UriHostNameType.Dns)
            {
                subDomain = Regex.Replace(HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.Host, "((.*)(\\..*){2})|(.*)", "$2");
            }

            if (subDomain.Length == 0)
            {
                subDomain = "www";
            }

            return subDomain.Trim().ToLower();
        }