Get route by name

Question

I'm working on an asp.net web api with hypermedia. Now I'm making a link creator that creates a link to a resource exposed by a controller. It should support attribute routes, which I've solved with reflection, but also mapped routes specified in Owin.AppBuilder:

public void Configuration(IAppBuilder appBuilder)
{
    var config = new HttpConfiguration();
    config.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
        name: "DefaultApi",
        routeTemplate: "{controller}/{id}",
        defaults: new { controller = "Home", id = RouteParameter.Optional }
        );
    // ...
}

I could use the UrlHelper class for this, but it depends on the current request, and the link I'm creating could be to another controller, and thus have no relationship with the current request. So what I need is to load the route configuration data for the route named DefaultApi. Is it any way to do this?

Answer 1

If you can use Route Attribute, you can name your route via a name property, what I did is I defined my routes in RoutesHelper and when I define my controller route, I reference this constant, and when I want to use CreatedAtRoute for example I reference the same routeName and pass the parameters to construct the route.

So let's say that my controller is called PeopleController, then I would define my controller as:

[Route("api/people/{id:int:min(1)?}", Name = RoutesHelper.RouteNames.People)]
public class PeopleController : ApiController
{
   // controller code here
}

where RoutesHelper is like this:

public static class RoutesHelper
{
    public struct RouteNames
    {
        public const string People = "People";
        // etc...
    }
}

Now in my Post method for example I use CreateAtRoute like this:

[HttpPost]
[ResponseType(typeof(PersonDto))]
public async Task<IHttpActionResult> AddAsync([FromBody] personDto dto)
{
    // some code to map my dto to the entity using automapper, and save the new entity goes here
    //.
    //.

    // here, I am mapping the saved entity to dto 
    var added = Mapper.Map<PersonDto>(person);

    // this is where I reference the route by it's name and construct the route parameters.
    var response = CreatedAtRoute(RoutesHelper.RouteNames.People, new { id = added.Id }, added);

    return response;
}

Hope this helps.