Routing a .GIF one way, the rest of the MVC 4 site another

Question

I've been trawling through 1000s of questions and blogs and still don't fully understand dam routing!

Along the lines of Scott Hanselman's blog I am trying to route a certain call to a .GIF to a custom HttpHandler while the rest of the MVC4 site behaves normally. I'm 90% of the way there.

So in the my RouteConfig I have

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.Add("AnalyticsRoute", new Route("analytics/a.gif", new AnalyticsRouteHandler()));
    routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });
    routes.RouteExistingFiles = true;
}

and in my web.config I have

<handlers>
  ...
  <add name="analytics" verb="*" path="analytics/a.gif" type="Lms.Analytics.AnalyticsHandler, Lms.Analytics" preCondition="managedHandler" />
</handlers>

Now this way, http://mysite.com/analytics/a.gif routes correctly and all is happy, however all my ActionLinks are resolving as http://mysite.com/analytics/a.gif?action=Index&controller=Category

If I reverse the order in the RouteConfig i.e.

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
    routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });
    routes.Add("AnalyticsRoute", new Route("analytics/a.gif", new AnalyticsRouteHandler()));
    routes.RouteExistingFiles = true;
}

All the links resolve just fine, but a call to http://mysite.com/analytics/a.gif results in a 404 error?

I must be doing something stupid and just can't see it?!

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

After finally coming across a similar post, I cracked it. The post was why is the httphandler not running

You need to ignore the path to the file you want the HttpHandler to handle

    public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
        routes.IgnoreRoute("analytics/a.gif");
        routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional });
        routes.RouteExistingFiles = true;
    }

The problem was when I added the web.config and removed the Route.Add I got a 404. I guess the Routing engine was over ruling the Handler.