How do you construct your routes?

.NET
1

After much thought, and perusal of samples, it came to me that I may be thinking about my route construction wrong. While I was learning mvc, all the “basic” sample used the following style:

{controller}/{action}/{id}

And this is how I’ve been thinking about it ever since. This works for the data model driven app, but seems to break down when using a domain model driven app. An example would be in a catalog style application that has the following aggregate chain:

Author -> Book -> Chapter

If one was to have the following controller, using the data driven model, things work:

ChapterController.Edit(id)

And then fetch, update, and commit the exact chapter needed.

But in a domain model, the topmost repository is for Author. You’d have to call the following to get the chapter.

Author author = authorRepository.GetByName(authorName);
Book book = author.LocateBookByName(bookName);
Chapter chapter = book.LocateChapterByName(chapterName);

Then perform your updates and commits. This would seem to want a route and handler more like:

Chapter/Edit/{authorName}/{bookName}/{chapterName}

ChapterController.Edit(string authorName, string bookName, string chapterName);

But even that doesn’t look entirely correct.

So the question is: how would YOU construct this route and handler?

This might expand my understanding greatly.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

2

In general, our admin interfaces live in a separate application from our public stuff, and no one really cares what urls look like on the back-end. So the edit scenario would probably be a more typical {controller}/{action}/{id} wheras the front-end ends up as pretty as we need it to be.

3

This wouldn’t be an admin interface though. Let me expand on this by using my forum application.

The Forum entity contains two lists: one is for sub Forums, the other for thread (Post entities). The Post entity also contains a list of replies (more Post entities).

So let’s say I have a top level forum titled “General Information” and a subforum in that titled “Outdated Information”. In this subforum, I made a post announcing something, and somebody replied to it with a question, and I replied clarifying something. We now have a Forum - Forum - Post - Post (reply) - Post (reply) scenario. Each entity being owned by the previous.

If I were to edit my reply, what should the url look like? The easiest of course is Post/Edit/42, where 42 is the post id. But this doesn’t follow DDD rules. For this to work, I’d need to have a PostRepository, and we all know that according to the aggregate chain, the only repository I should have is ForumRepository. But in this case, I would need an url that was dynamic enough to accomodate any level of nested forums and posts.

Advice?