RouteValues with a ViewModel

Question

I have a ViewModel that is a very simple filter object like this:

public class FilterViewModel
{
    public String FilterTerm { get; set; }
    public String FilterProperty { get; set; }
}

what I was hoping to do was to do a route link from another page into this one and pass my FilterViewModel into the route url creation into the RouteValues like this:

Url.RouteUrl("myRoute", new { filter = new FilterViewModel() { FilterProperty = "Product", FilterTerm = _detail.FilterTerm }})"

Lo, what renders on the other side is

http://theurl?filter=Fully.Qualified.Namespace.FilterViewModel

I don't know what I expected, perhaps something that's serialized into the query string like this:

http://theurl?filter=FilterProperty|Product,FilterTerm|ProductA

Is there anyway to do what I'm trying to do out of the box? (or not out of the box)

Answer 1

Try like this:

Url.RouteUrl(
    "myRoute", 
    new { 
        FilterProperty = "Product", 
        FilterTerm = _detail.FilterTerm 
    }
)

No idea how your routing configuration looks like but this might produce something among the lines of http://theurl?FilterProperty=Product&FilterTerm=ProductA. For anything more exotic like the urls you have shown in your question you will have to write custom helpers. It's nothing standard.