CODEWITHSUNDEEP
asp.net-mvcurlcookiesroutes
QMaster
QMaster

Reputation: 3904

ASP.NET MVC Specify Category/Path outside of URL Routing

I have a problem to make a decision for putting Category/Path on URL Routing. Assume I have some products in my sample Web Application those attached to some categories. For example:

Book1 Attached to -> Category1 | Category2 
Book2 Attached to -> Category1 | Category2 | Category3
Book3 Attached to -> Category2 | Category3

And defined routing map for products is:

url: "{controller}/{action}/{languageCode}/{category}/{product}"
defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "ViewItem" }

So possible routing for Book1 are:

[Domain Name]/Home/ViewItem/en-US/Category1/Book1
[Domain Name]/Home/ViewItem/en-US/Category2/Book1

And possible routing for Book2 are:

[Domain Name]/Home/ViewItem/en-US/Category1/Book2
[Domain Name]/Home/ViewItem/en-US/Category2/Book2
[Domain Name]/Home/ViewItem/en-US/Category3/Book2

I want to save and know current category but have single unique URL for each product(For search engine tracking and sharing URLs purpose). I think about using Session Variable or ViewBag even Cookie, But each of them has own limitations and cons. For example using cookies may cause some troubles: if set expiration time too small, it may lost current path when user pausing on some pages and if set it too long, may lead user to old browsing path even user requested for home page in new opening browser because of existing cookie (Except that, I'v some experiences with cookies and I believe that is not working precisely all times), About Session and ViewBag I don't know if using them is the best idea, So can anyone share tested solution or good idea? I will appreciate that.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 322

Answers (2)

Mikaal Anwar
Mikaal Anwar

Reputation: 1791

I suspect this isn’t a routing problem, rather an architectural issue. I think that the “language code” and “category” should be an attribute of the Book object, rather than being a part of the route.

You would then have URLs like:

{domain}/{controller}/book/id

And for “category” specific or “language code” specific views, you could have URLs like:

{domain}/{controller}/search?languageCode=enUS&category=1

This would still be perfectly RESTful and in my opinion, much simpler as well.

Upvotes: 1

Maryam Ghafarinia
Maryam Ghafarinia

Reputation: 458

You should have the page mywebsite.com/product1 (the canonical version of the URL). Including all the versions of the URL won't help. Likely, it will just confuse Google and may lead to Google ignoring certain URLs

Even if you put in the canonical version and have the rel canonical tag on your pages, Google may still choose to treat another version of the URL as canonical.

Ideally, then, I'd solve the real problem here and just have one version of the product URL on your site (have the versions with the category in the URL redirect to the version of the URL with no category in the URL). That way you don't even have to worry about all the issues duplicate content may cause.

Upvotes: 2

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