asp.net mvc Html.ActionLink() keeping route value I don't want

Question

I have the following ActionLink in my view

<%= Html.ActionLink("LinkText", "Action", "Controller"); %>

and it creates the following URL http://mywebsite.com/Controller/Action

Say I add an ID at the end like so: http://mywebsite.com/Controller/Action/53 and navigate to the page. On this page I have the markup I specified above. Now when I look at the URL it creates it looks like this:

http://mywebsite.com/Controller/Action/53 (notice the addition of the ID)

But I want it to remove the ID and look like it did originally, like this http://mywebsite.com/Controller/Action (notice no ID here)

Any ideas how I can fix this? I don't want to use hard coded URLs since my controller/actions may change.

Answer 1

The solution is to specify my own route values (the third parameter below)

<%= Html.ActionLink("LinkText", "Action", "Controller", 
    new { id=string.Empty }, null) %>

Answer 2

It sounds like you need to register a second "Action Only" route and use Html.RouteLink(). First register a route like this in you application start up:

routes.MapRoute("ActionOnly", "{controller}/{action}", 
   new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" } );

Then instead of ActionLink to create those links use:

Html.RouteLink("About","ActionOnly")

Answer 3

The problem is the built in methods take input from the URL you are currently on as well as what you supply. You could try this:

<%= Html.ActionLink("LinkText", "Action", "Controller", new { id = ""}) %>

That should manually wipe the id parameter.

Answer 4

Don't know why, but it didn't work for me (maybe because of Mvc2 RC). Created urlhelper method =>

 public static string
            WithoutRouteValues(this UrlHelper helper, ActionResult action,params string[] routeValues)
        {
            var rv = helper.RequestContext.RouteData.Values;
            var ignoredValues = rv.Where(x=>routeValues.Any(z => z == x.Key)).ToList();
            foreach (var ignoredValue in ignoredValues)
                rv.Remove(ignoredValue.Key);
            var res = helper.Action(action);
            foreach (var ignoredValue in ignoredValues)
                rv.Add(ignoredValue.Key, ignoredValue.Value);
            return res;
        }

Answer 5

If you either don't know what values need to be explicitly overridden or you just want to avoid the extra list of parameters you can use an extension method like the below.

<a href="@Url.Isolate(u => u.Action("View", "Person"))">View</a>

The implementation details are in this blog post

Answer 6

I explicitly set the action name as "Action/". Seems a little like a hack but it's a quick fix.

@Html.ActionLink("Link Name", "Action/", "Controller")

Answer 7

Another way is to use ActionLink(HtmlHelper, String, String, RouteValueDictionary) overload, then there are no need to put null in the last parameter

<%= Html.ActionLink("Details", "Details", "Product", new RouteValueDictionary(new { id=item.ID })) %>

Answer 8

The overloads of Html.ActionLink are changed on the later versions of MVC. On MVC 5 and above. This is how to do this:

@Html.ActionLink("LinkText", "Action", "Controller", new { id = "" }, null)

Note I passed "" for id parameter and null for HTMLATTRIBUTES.

Answer 9

I needed my menu links to be dynamic. Rather than implement a lot of extra code and routing for every single page I simple dispensed with the HTML helper.

<a href="@(item.websiteBaseURL)/@(item.controller)/@(item.ViewName)">@item.MenuItemName</a>