ASP.NET Webforms routing - how to stop trailing slash being routed?

Question

Given the following code, in my ASP.NET webform app;

void foo(RouteCollection routes){
 routes.MapPageRoute(string.Empty, "testroute", "~/hello.aspx", false);
}

The problem is, while http://localhost/testroute routes to hello.aspx, http://localhost/testroute/ also routes to hello.aspx.

Is there anyway to prevent this?

• TGlatzer: Do you have more routing rules? Or is it this single one?
• maxp: Ah sorry the example use case I gave didnt make any sense, ive corrected it now.
• Andrew Barber: Okay, that makes more sense, now! Why is this a problem, btw? The server actually won't treat URLs differently whether they have a trailing slash or not, normally; even if the URL is a file. For example, you could load /hello.aspx and /hello.aspx/ and get the same result.
• Andrew Barber: Also, please be sure to use @AndrewBarber to respond to me, so I am notified. Or prefix anyone's name who has commented with an @ sign to notify them. We don't need to do that with you because we are responding to your post; the owner of a post that comments are posted to is automatically notified.
• maxp: @AndrewBarber - thanks for the tip! It is for cosmetic reasons to an extent. Are you saying its not possible?

Answer 1

The best thing to do here, in my opinion, is simply to make sure your website uses consistent URLs in its <a> tags. Don't worry about extraneous paths into your routing mechanism, but instead concentrate on being sure to use only the desired URL pattern for your links.

For example, make sure your website does not contain any <a> tags with href="/testroute/", and it won't matter that it responds to that.

As I noted in the comments, it's actually standard that a trailing slash at the end of the path portion of a URL has no effect; you can include it, or not. This means two 'different' URLs can load the same page: /page.aspx and /page.aspx/ both load the same thing. But there's also another longstanding tradition here that is similar, with default documents; that is, / and /default.aspx will tend to load the same thing.

The solution in that case is, of course, the same as the solution here: Just be sure that your <a> tags use a consistent, single version of the URLs you want to use.

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For the record, you could do something that detects the trailing slash and issues a 301 redirect, but I think it's much easier just to make sure you are consistent with the URLs.