How do you use querystrings with ASP.NET routing?

Question

The new ASP.NET routing is great for simple path style URL's but if you want to use a url such as:

http://example.com/items/search.xhtml?term=Text+to+find&page=2

Do you have to use a catch all parameter with a validation?

Answer 1

Any view data items that are not listed in the route are automatically mapped to the querystring, so if you map "items/search.xhtml" to an action:

Search(string term, int page)

Then you should get the results you are looking for.

Answer 2

You can match querystring parameters with routes as well, if you want to just capture everything you need to add a parameter like so:

{*contentUrl}

Which will populate the rest of the url into that variable.

Answer 3

I was also having trouble passing an encoded URL to a route as a route parameter.

You can't use url encoded chars in a URL, but you can in a query string.

Therefore I needed my route to also have a query string element to it.

Say I have a route:

MapPageRoute("myroute", "myroute/{x}", "~/routehander.aspx")

But I want it in the form of:

http://mywebsite.com/myroute/{x}?url=myurl

We can do this:

Dim x as integer = 12
Dim rvd As New Routing.RouteValueDictionary
rvd.Add("x", x)
rvd.Add("url", Server.UrlEncode("/default.aspx"))
HttpContext.Current.ApplicationInstance.Response.RedirectToRoutePermanent("myroute", rvd)

This would redirect us to the following url:

http://mywebsite.com/myroute/12?url=%252fdefault.aspx

Answer 4

You can still use Request.QueryString["some_value"];