ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Using Routes with Default Parameters

Another powerful feature of the URL routing system is the capability to supply some meaningful defaults for route parameters. For example, you might have a product category page that displays products within that category. If the user doesn’t specify a category, you might want to pick a default one.

In the following route configuration, we have a category browser page that we can reach with the “/category/{name}” route pattern. If the user doesn’t supply a category name, we supply a default:

In this case, the default supplied is the “explosives” category. The target page doesn’t need to know that it was invoked ...