Routing to areas

MVC has supported the concept of areas for a long time. Essentially, areas are for segregating and organizing controllers and views, so that, for example, you can have identically named controllers in different areas.

Visual Studio lets you create folders in a project and then add controllers and views to them. You can mark these folders as areas.

Where routing is concerned, areas add another route token, appropriately named area, to controller and action. If you are to use areas, you will likely have another segment in your template, such as this:

Products/Phones/Index
Reporting/Sales/Index

Here, Products and Reporting are areas. You need to map them to routes so that they are recognized by MVC. You can use the MapControllerRoute extension method, but you will need to supply the area token as follows:

app.UseEndpoints(endpoints =>
{
    endpoints.MapControllerRoute(
        name: "default",
        pattern: "{area:exists}/{controller}/{action}/{id?}",
        defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" });
});

You can also use the MapAreaControllerRoute extension method, which takes care of adding the area parameter:

endpoints.MapAreaControllerRoute(
    name: "default",
    areaName: "Products",
    pattern: "List/{controller}/{action}/{id?}",
    defaults: new { controller = "Phones", action = "Index" });

This route will map a request of List/Phones/Index to an Indexaction method of a PhonesControllercontroller inside the Products area.

That's it for areas. Let's now have a look at routing attributes.