MvcSiteMapProvider not generating correct URLs in dynamic nodes

Question

I wrote a dynamic node provider that looks like so:

public override IEnumerable<DynamicNode> GetDynamicNodeCollection(ISiteMapNode node)
    {
        var dictionaryDefs = from d in provider.GetDictionaries()
                                 orderby d.DisplayNamePlural
                                 select d;


        foreach (DictionaryInfo di in dictionaryDefs)
        {
            var newNode = new DynamicNode()
            {
                Title = di.DisplayNamePlural,
                Description = "Import " + di.DisplayNamePlural,
                ParentKey = "Import Records" 
            };

            newNode.Attributes.Add("entity",di.DictionaryName);

            yield return newNode;

        }
    }

My template node looks like (namespace and assembly names anonymized):

<mvcSiteMapNode title ="ToBeReplaced" route="CMS_EntityAction"   controller="ImportDictionary" action="Import"  crudlevel="Update" dynamicNodeProvider="NameSpace.INeedToImportDataNodeProvider, MyAssembly"/>

And here is the Route I specified for it to use:

routes.MapRoute(
            "CMS_EntityAction", // Route name
            "{controller}/{action}/{entity}",
            new { action = "Index", controller = "Grid", showCheckboxes = UrlParameter.Optional },
            new { controller = @"(Grid|ImportDictionary)" }              
            );

Note that the dynamic node provider supplies the entity value, but the controller and action are to be inherited from the template.

All I get for Urls, though is "#", which from what I can tell in skimming the source, means the UrlResolver couldn't resolve the Url.

If I remove the specific route name from the template node (route="CMS_EntityAction") then it just generates the same URL over and over again for each node which is /ImportDictionary/Import which is missing the entity value as the 3rd segment.

I've tried specifying the controller and action in the dynamic node provider instead of the template and I get the same thing, it just will not use the value of entity in creating the URL.

Any ideas of what I need to change, specify or fix? Thanks.

(Please don't judge me on that ShowCheckboxes thing, it's out of my hands :-) )

Answer 1

The problem is that you are not adding the "entity" to the RouteValues collection of the node, but you are instead adding it to Attributes, making it a custom attribute value. Custom attributes are not taken into consideration when generating the URL.

If you change:

newNode.Attributes.Add("entity",di.DictionaryName);

To:

newNode.RouteValues.Add("entity",di.DictionaryName);

Then the entity argument will be inserted into the URL.