How to set ASP.Net MVC Routing parameter

Question

I'm creating a website with internationalization and what I want to do is to support URL with this format:

"{country}/{controller}/{action}"

How can I tell the routing engine that {country} should be set using a session variable?

• Steve Martin: Enquiry: If you are using the country in your route, why would you need to maintain it within session? You can use the route as a means of persisting the selected country through page requests thereby negating the need to use session to remember this.
• JuChom: If someone connect to localhost/ {controller} = "Home", {Action} = "Index". But for {country} if the user comes from an english speaking country {country} = "en", from a spanish speaking country "es", from a french speaking country "fr" and so on. I thought storing the {country} in a session variable to reuse it, but I'm open to all suggestions.

Answer 1

You can do this with a custom Controller Factory. Start with your route:

routes.MapRoute(
 "Default", // Route name
 "{language}/{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
 new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", language = "tr", id = UrlParameter.Optional }, // Parameter defaults
 new { language = @"(tr)|(en)" }
);

I handle the culture by overriding the GetControllerInstance method of DefaultControllerFactory. The example is below:

public class LocalizedControllerFactory : DefaultControllerFactory {
 protected override IController GetControllerInstance(System.Web.Routing.RequestContext requestContext, Type controllerType) {
 //Get the {language} parameter in the RouteData
 string UILanguage;
 if (requestContext.RouteData.Values["language"] == null) {
 UILanguage = "tr";
 else 
 UILanguage = requestContext.RouteData.Values["language"].ToString();
 //Get the culture info of the language code
 CultureInfo culture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(UILanguage);
 Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = culture;
 Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = culture;
 return base.GetControllerInstance(requestContext, controllerType);
 }
}

You can here get the value from session instead of hardcoding it as I did.

and register it on the Global.asax:

protected void Application_Start() {
 //... 
 ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(new NinjectControllerFactory());
}