Asp.net MVC/Web Api Routing: Need to route a little different

Question

I have setup a asp.net web api project (it works exactly the same as a Mvc Project) using routing - hence i have the following

routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "API Default",
    routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
    defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);

So everything works just the way i want it .... I enter api/Products/15 it it arrives in my Products Controller passing in 15 as the id.

Great.

I also have 2 controllers more, 1 called UploadsController and 1 called DownloadsController. These offer Uploads and Downloads (GET / PUT etc)

Now i don't want them to be picked up by the original rule (see above)

But what i would like is to use these 2 urls to access them

/api/Transport/Uploads/15 /api/Transport/Downloads/15

I have passed in 15 as the ID, probably wouldn't happen in real life... just its good for demonstration :-)

Now Transport doesn't exist so i could do the following

routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "API Default",
    routeTemplate: "api/Transports/{controller}/{id}",
    defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional }
);

which i believe works...

but the problem is that if i do

/api/Uploads/15 - this would also be caught by the original rule which i don't want..

I want the Uploads and DOwnloads controller to be accessed through the fake "Transports" and not without the Transports

Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You could use route constraints and define 2 API routes in the following order:

// matches /api/transports/downloads/id or /api/transports/uploads/id only
// and no other possible controller
routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "API Transport",
    routeTemplate: "api/transports/{controller}/{id}",
    defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional },
    constraints: new { controller = "uploads|downloads" }
);

// matches anything in the form /api/{controller}/id where {controller}
// could be anythnig different than "downloads" or "uploads" because we don't
// want to allow the following urls: /api/downloads/id and /api/uploads/id
routes.MapHttpRoute(
    name: "API Default",
    routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
    defaults: new { id = RouteParameter.Optional },
    constraints: new { controller = @"^((?!(downloads|uploads)).)*$" }
);