URL Routing in ASP.Net Web Forms - Same number of Parameters

Yesterday, our team faced an interesting issue in URL Routing. My subordinate was finding difficulty in resolving a problem with routes having same number of parameters. So, I thought of sharing it with you the same. Issue goes like this.

ISSUE

Two routes were created in Global.asax file as shown below:

routeCollection.MapPageRoute("ProjectType", "{dealtype}/{searchstring}", "~/result.aspx");
routeCollection.MapPageRoute("CompanyDetail", "company-details/{personID}", "~/companyregistration.aspx");

Now, in the above case, in "ProjectType" route both the parameters are dynamic whereas for the "CompanyDetail" route, one part of the route is hard-coded i.e. 'company-details' and other parameter is dynamically set. But, when I redirect to route of company details, it was still requesting result.aspx instead of companyregistration.aspx. We tried both the ways of redirecting to the route.

Response.RedirectToRoute("CompanyDetail", new { personID = lngPersonID.ToString() });

OR

Response.Redirect("company-details/" + lngPersonID.ToString());

But it was requesting result.aspx.

RESOLUTION

After trying quite a few options, we made the following change in the Global.asax file and it worked. We just changed the order of the route declaration.

routeCollection.MapPageRoute("CompanyDetail", "company-details/{personID}", "~/companyregistration.aspx");
routeCollection.MapPageRoute("ProjectType", "{dealtype}/{searchstring}", "~/result.aspx");

After changing the order of declaration, both the routes were working.

CONCLUSION

After looking at this issue, following points can be concluded:

Routes without any hard-coded identifier must be declared at the last.
If there are more than one routes without any hard-coded identifier and having the same number of identifier, then the route declared first will override all others and will be considered by ASP.Net.

I hope this article was useful to you. You can post your inputs and extra information in the comments section.

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Thanks & Regards,
Munjal