How to make MVC Routing handle url with dashes

Question

I have a route defined as follows in MVC:

routes.MapRoute(
 name: "ContentNavigation",
 url: "{viewType}/{category}-{subCategory}",
 defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "GetMenuAndContent", viewType = String.Empty, category = String.Empty, subCategory = String.Empty });

If I navigate to http://example.com/something/category-and-this-is-a-subcategory

It fills the variables as:

viewType: "something"
category: "category-and-this-is-a"
subCategory: "subcategory".

What I want is for the word before the first dash to always go into category, and the remaining into subcategory. So it would produce:

viewType: "something"
category: "category"
subCategory: "and-this-is-a-subcategory"

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

One possibility is to write a custom route to handle the proper parsing of the route segments:

public class MyRoute : Route
{
 public MyRoute()
 : base(
 "{viewType}/{*catchAll}",
 new RouteValueDictionary(new 
 {
 controller = "Home",
 action = "GetMenuAndContent",
 }),
 new MvcRouteHandler()
 )
 {
 }
 public override RouteData GetRouteData(HttpContextBase httpContext)
 {
 var rd = base.GetRouteData(httpContext);
 if (rd == null)
 {
 return null;
 }
 var catchAll = rd.Values["catchAll"] as string;
 if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(catchAll))
 {
 var parts = catchAll.Split(new[] { '-' }, 2, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);
 if (parts.Length > 1)
 {
 rd.Values["category"] = parts[0];
 rd.Values["subCategory"] = parts[1];
 return rd;
 }
 }
 return null;
 }
}

that you will register like that:

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
 routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
 routes.Add("ContentNavigation", new MyRoute());
 ...
}

Now assuming that the client requests /something/category-and-this-is-a-subcategory, then the following controller action will be invoked:

public class HomeController : Controller
{
 public ActionResult GetMenuAndContent(string viewType, string category, string subCategory)
 {
 // viewType = "something"
 // category = "category"
 // subCategory = "and-this-is-a-subcategory"
 ...
 }
}