How can I have lowercase routes in ASP.NET MVC?

Question

How can I have lowercase, plus underscore if possible, routes in ASP.NET MVC? So that I would have /dinners/details/2 call DinnersController.Details(2) and, if possible, /dinners/more_details/2 call DinnersController.MoreDetails(2)?

All this while still using patterns like {controller}/{action}/{id}.

Answer 1

With System.Web.Routing 4.5 you may implement this straightforward by setting LowercaseUrls property of RouteCollection:

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

        routes.LowercaseUrls = true;

        routes.MapRoute(
            name: "Default",
            url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }
        );
    }

Also assuming you are doing this for SEO reasons you want to redirect incoming urls to lowercase (as said in many of the links off this article).

protected void Application_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
  //You don't want to redirect on posts, or images/css/js
  bool isGet = HttpContext.Current.Request.RequestType.ToLowerInvariant().Contains("get");
  if (isGet && HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsolutePath.Contains(".") == false)    
  {
     string lowercaseURL = (Request.Url.Scheme + "://" + HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.Authority + HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.AbsolutePath);
     if (Regex.IsMatch(lowercaseURL, @"[A-Z]"))
     {
      //You don't want to change casing on query strings
      lowercaseURL = lowercaseURL.ToLower() + HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.Query;

      Response.Clear();
      Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently";
      Response.AddHeader("Location", lowercaseURL); 
      Response.End();
    }
 }
}