Basics: Routing in ASP.NET Web forms

Many of our friends think that Routing is a feature of ASP.NET MVC and cannot be used with ASP.NET web forms. But the fact is that, Routing is a part of ASP.NET core. It is added to the core in ASP.NET 3.5 SP1. In ASP.NET 4.0, routing is made more developer friendly. So, anything that falls under ASP.NET family can use routing.

Using routing in ASP.NET Web Forms, we can generate URLs that don’t correspond to the physical file. Server will reach the physical file to be rendered using the parameters passed with route URL. Defining pretty URLs makes the pages easily searchable by the search engines.


Using Routing with ASP.NET Web forms

To use routing in an ASP.NET Web Forms application, we have to register the routes when the application starts. This means, the routes have to be registered to System.Web.Routing.RouteTable.Routes collection in the Application_Start event of Global.asax. There are several overloads of MapPageRoute method in RouteCollection, but we usually use the following overload:

public Route MapPageRoute(string routeName, string routeUrl, string physicalFile);

Following is an example of registering a simple route which can be used to hide extension of aspx forms:

routes.MapPageRoute("basic-route", "{page}", "~/{page}.aspx");

Once this route is registered, we can safely replace the URL

http://mysite/Page.aspx

with the following URL:

http://mysite/Page

But, this route doesn’t work if we have some pages in a folder. For example, suppose the web application has a folder named Account and this folder has the forms Login.aspx and Register.aspx, we would expect the page Login.aspx to respond when we hit the URL

http://mysite/Account/Login

But, it doesn’t work as we didn’t define a route for it. We have to add the following route to the route table to make this URL work as we expected:

routes.MapPageRoute("folder-route", "{folder}/{Page}", "~/{folder}/{Page}.aspx");

Now a question arises that, do we need to hard-code the routed URLs in hyperlinks? The answer is no. We can refer to the registered routes by their names and provide values to the route parameters to get the URL generated for us. Following HyperLink generates the URL to Login page we discussed above:

<asp:HyperLink ID="hlLogin" Text="Login" NavigateUrl="<%$ RouteUrl:RouteName=folder-route,folder=Account,page=Login %>" runat="server" />

We can also pass input parameters to a page using route parameters. For example, if we have a page named Book.aspx that lists a set of books on a particular topic and the topic is passed using QueryString to the page as shown below,

http://mysite/Book.aspx?topic=JavaScript

We can avoid usage of QueryString and make the URL prettier as shown below

http://mysite/Book/JavaScript

To achieve this we have to add the following route to the RouteCollection:

routes.MapPageRoute("book", "Book/{BookName}", "~/Book.aspx");

The route value passed to this page can be accessed from both aspx mark-up and from code behind file. Following mark-up demonstrates displaying mark-up value on a label:

<asp:Label ID="lblBookName" Text="<%$ RouteValue:BookName %>" runat="server" />

Following code snippet shows accessing the route value from code behind file:

var bookName = Page.RouteData.Values["BookName"].ToString();

This value can be used to query database or any other type of further processing.

Further learning:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd347546.aspx 
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2009/10/13/url-routing-with-asp-net-4-web-forms-vs-2010-and-net-4-0-series.aspx
http://haacked.com/archive/2008/03/11/using-routing-with-webforms.aspx


Happy coding!