asp.net webforms routing: optional parameters

I want to add optional parameters in my routing table.
For example I would like the users to browse a product catalog like this:
http://www.domain.com/browse/by-category/electronics/1,2,3 etc

Now i’ve created a route like this:

            routes.MapPageRoute(
           "ProductsBrowse",
            "browse/{BrowseBy}/{Category}",
            "~/Pages/Products/Browse.aspx"
        );

Problem however is that when a user enters http://www.domain.com/browse , I would like them to present a different page where they can pick the manner on how to browse. So the parameters {BrowseBy} and {Category} will not be used.

Is there a way around this then to create seperate routes for each of the scenarios?

Thank you for your time!
Kind regards,
Mark

Answers:

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Method 1

I just came across this question, and knew there had to be way to do this. There is-

MapPageRoute has an overload that will allow you to specify defaults. here’s an example usage based on your code:

routes.MapPageRoute(
       "ProductsBrowse",
        "browse/{BrowseBy}/{Category}",
        "~/Pages/Products/Browse.aspx",
        false,
        new RouteValueDictionary { { "Category", string.Empty } }
    );

So if the user doesn’t specify a category this route will still be hit. The problem I have with using two separate routes is that I have links setup around my site that are generated by route name, and you cannot have two routes that have the same name.

Here’s good documentation from MSDN: here

Method 2

try this:

routes.MapPageRoute(
           "ProductsBrowse",
            "browse/{BrowseBy}/{Category}/{*queryvalues}",
            "~/Pages/Products/Browse.aspx"
        );

Method 3

I’d just create the separate route.

That said, you could define a custom RouteHandler that based on some convention you define, automatically send those special cases as if you had a different route.

Alternatively you could use the custom RouteHandler along with a convention, to avoid having to specify the specific page in your routes. That’s the equivalent of what asp.net MVC does.

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0