Can `area=""` of the default route be changed to non-empty string value?

Question

When creating a new MVC project in Visual Studio, the navigation bar that is created in the _Layout.cshtml file contains the link shown below. It serves the purpose of being the "Home" button for your application, and the area="" value indicates the default area.

It works fine enough, but I was wondering if it possible to replace "" with a named value.

@Html.ActionLink("Sample", "Index", "Home", 
      new { area = "" }, new { @class = "navbar-brand" })

I looked at the default route and didn't see any parameters for area.

routes.MapRoute(
    name: "Default",
    url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id =  
             UrlParameter.Optional }
    );

Is there some easy tweak I can make so that area="" can be written as `area="default", or some other non-empty value?

Answer 1

When using ActionLink/RouteLink/UrlHelper there is a special case where you have to put the area into the route values collection.

However, under the covers MVC actually uses DataTokens["area"] to determine what area to match. So if you are comparing against the current request, you could check whether DataTokens["area"] exists - if not, it indicates a request for the default area.

You can also set that parameter on the routes in your route configuration if you want them to be specific to an area.

routes.MapRoute(
    name: "Default",
    url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
    defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id =  
         UrlParameter.Optional }
    ).DataTokens["area"] = "default";