Current status (10/2018):

This is repository is going be rewritten to general navigation framework with WPF and ASP.NET implementations - blueprint.

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AspNet.Navigation

Model (class) base navigation and routing for ASP.NET (Core) MVC

NuGet

This library is distributed on NuGet under APACHE 2.0 license.

• Current version of NuGet package for (full) ASP.NET

Introduction

The ASP.NET routing and link creation is missing type safety. In this library the routing is based on models, a C# define classes for each route. We can quite simply satify default route from MVC with model:

[Route("{Controller}/{Action}/{Id?}")
public class MvcRoute : RouteModel
{
    public string Controller { get; private set; }
    public string Action { get; private set; }
    public int? Id { get; private set; }
    
    public MvcRoute(string controller, string action, int? id = null)
        : base(null)
    {
        Controller = controller;
        Action = action;
        Id = id;
    }
}

And then, when creating link in Razor's .cshtml, we can use:

@Html.ModelLink("Go Home!", new MvcRoute("Home", "Index"))

This is a bit better, but not that much. Let's see how we can declare route from blog post. We want url in form like blog/{Year}/{Month}/{Day}/{Slug}. In the standart MVC, we need to create route link like this:

@Html.RouteLink("View post", new { 
    Year = post.PublishedAt.Year, 
    Month = post.PublishedAt.Month, 
    Day = post.PublishedAt.Day, 
    Slug = post.Slug 
})

But when using Neptuo.AspNet.Navigation, we can do the same with this code:

@Html.ModelLink("View post", new BlogPostRoute(post.PublishedAt, post.Slug))

We also benefit from the fact, then the model can deconstruct the date itself. So route model is defined like:

[Route("blog/{Year}/{Month}/{Day}/{Slug}")]
public class BlogPostRoute : RouteModel
{
    public int Year { get; private set; }
    public int Month { get; private set; }
    public int Day { get; private set; }
    public string Slug { get; private set; }
    
    public BlogPostRoute(DateTime publishedAt, string slug)
    {
        Year = publishedAt.Year;
        Month = publishedAt.Month;
        Day = publishedAt.Day;
        Slug = slug;
    }
}

Sample web application (in the src/sample) contains usage of all features, including route constraints.

Route registration

The registration process is pretty straightforward, just add the model to the route collection using extension method:

routes.MapModel<BlogPostRoute>();

Reading the parameters in the controller action method

We can easily use the route class in the parameter of action method to bind-in parameters. Note that for this use the property setters must be public.

public class BlogController
{
    public ActionResult Post(BlogPostRoute parameters)
    {
        // TODO: Find blog post by Year, Month, Day and Slug...
    }
}

License

Apache 2.0