ASP.Net MVC Routing issue with Html.BeginForm

Question

Using MVC, I have an html form helper in my view:

using (Html.BeginForm("ActionOne", "ControllerOne")) ...

Using the default route, the output for the action attribute is as expected:

<form action="/ControllerOne/ActionOne" ...

But registrering a new route with seemingly no matches affects the output.

Routing code:

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

    routes.Add("testRoute", new Route("MyUrl", new MvcRouteHandler()));

    routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index"});
}

Output:

<form action="/MyUrl?action=ActionOne&amp;controller=ControllerOne"

Is this by design or am I mising something fundamental?

Cheers!

Answer 1

I have experienced this exact problem. I'm not sure exactly why the System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper seems to just use the first non-ignore route in the routetable to generate links etc from but I have found a workaround for the "BeginForm" issue.

If you have named your "Default" route in the Global.asax.cs, for example:

routes.MapRoute("Default", "{controller}/{action}", new {controller = "Home", action = "Index" });

Then you can use the Html.BeginFormRoute method and call the name of the "Default" MVC route, then name the controller and action specifically, resulting in the correct url:

using (Html.BeginRouteForm("Default", new { controller="YourController", action = "YourFormAction" })) { }

HTH