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I have an ASP.NET MVC3 Razor application getting too big to manage effectively. To have better control over the code I implemented Areas and re-arranged the code to be in the respective areas.

Things that are used from multiple areas are left in the "normal" controller folder.

My problem arises as soon as I use an Action or ActionLink from an area. I have to manually include a routing parameter called 'area = ""' to have the link work.

There are a lot of links to be changed, so I tried to have the controller selection fallback to the "root" controllers to find the needed controller. I had no luck so far.

What do I have to do to enable MVC3 to search through the area controllers and continue to search in the root controllers folder if the controller is not found?

Thanks Andreas

nttakr
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You can do this by setting up your routes appropriately.

Each area has it's own route supplier, and then there are the routes in the global.ascx. The routes act sort of like a case statement, where it tries to find the routes in the areas first, and if it doesn't find a matching route, it then falls through to the global.ascx routes.

So, in your new areas, setup a catchall route, and in the global.ascx setup a catchall route and you should be ok.

You can use Haack's route debugger to see what is happening with your routes.

drneel
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  • Hi dmeel, thanks for the answer to my question. I am not sure if it will work though. I sort of disabled the "fall through" setting due to the fact that I have equally named controllers in the areas. This is due to the design of the project and cannot be changed. So I have to set an explicit area name to prevent an error message for finding multiple controllers. But at the same time I'd need the fallback if NO controller is found in the current area. And that's a problem. – nttakr Sep 16 '11 at 14:05
  • A solution would have to work like: - search for controller name 'xxx' - if found in current area => OK - (ignore same controller in other areas or root) - if not found, set current area to '' and try again. - if not found in root area, then tell the error-tale.. – nttakr Sep 16 '11 at 14:05
  • @nttakr Can you give an example of a controller that is in two different areas and the routes that you have setup for them, with the urls? – drneel Sep 16 '11 at 14:21