MVC 3 keeping short url

Question

I have MVC3 application, where I want to keep short URL. what is the best or clean way to do this? Lets say I have two controllers Account and Home. I have all the account related tasks Logon, Logoff, Profile, FAQs etc. in Account controller. All the main tasks in home controller like TaskA, TaskB, and TaskC. I am looking for URL as below:

1. www.mydomain.com/Logon
2. www.mydomain.com/Logoff
3. www.mydomain.com/Profile
4. www.mydomain.com/FAQs
5. www.mydomain.com/TaskA
6. www.mydomain.com/TaskB

when user first come to the website they need to redirect to Logon page. At any time user should also able to switch from once controller action to another controller action (from TaskA to Logoff).

what is the clean way to do this?

Answer 1

You don't need to set a route for each URL. With a little help from route constraints you can do something like this:

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Home", // Route name
            "{action}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" }, // Parameter defaults
            new { action = "TaskA|TaskB|TaskC|etc" } //Route constraints
        );

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Account", // Route name
            "{action}", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Account", action = "Logon" }, // Parameter defaults
            new { action = "Logon|Logoff|Profile|FAQs|etc" } //Route constraints
        );

Answer 2

You can set a route for the specific urls that do not match the default route. For example:

routes.MapRoute("Logon", "logon/", new { controller = "account", action = "logon" });
routes.MapRoute("TaskA", "TaskA/", new { controller = "home", action = "taska" });

Your default route can define your start page if all other matches for the url are not found.

routes.MapRoute(
            "Default", // Route name
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}/", // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "account", action = "logon", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults