URL Rewrite for hosted mvc.net site.

Recently I've been working on deployment of an MVC.NET based site to Azure. As a part of this I needed to re-map request url's from the Azure dns host name to my dns host. After a few fumbling starts I opted to use the IIS URL Rewriter module. The module is installed (by default) on Azure so it was good to go. I spent a good while looking into some of the other available options, in particular the SEO templates for lower-case and trailing-slash. I've had prior experience with url re-writing modules... not much of it good. I did manage to get a re-write rule set to trim and lower case my urls, but I felt it was too fragile to keep.
In the end I settled on just a host-name redirect.

<system.webServer>
<.other.>
<rewrite>
  <rules>
    <rule name="HostName" enabled="true" stopProcessing="false">
    <match url="(.*)" />
    <conditions>
      <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="YOUR\.SERVICENAME\.cloudapp\.net" />
    </conditions>
    <action type="Redirect" url="{MapSSL:{HTTPS}}/YOURHOSTNAME/{R:1}"/>
    </rule>
  </rules>
  <rewriteMaps>
  <rewriteMap name="MapSSL" defaultValue="OFF">
    <add key="ON" value="https://" />
    <add key="OFF" value="http://" />
  </rewriteMap>
  </rewriteMaps>
  </rewrite>
</system.webServer>

Many thanks to RuslanY for his tips: http://ruslany.net/2009/04/10-url-rewriting-tips-and-tricks/.
This rule was inspired from the stackoverflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2608994/iis7-url-rewriting-how-not-to-drop-https-protocol-from-rewritten-url

Of additional interest: http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/url-rewrite-module-configuration-reference
http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/using-the-url-rewrite-module

Multiple submit buttons with MVC 3.

I recently needed to create a MVC (MVC3) view with multiple submit buttons.
A quick look around with Google and I found a couple of approaches, but I thought to myself, there must be a cleaner way.

Up till now I've been using the simple approach of creating a controller action where the method takes an extra parameter to describe which action to take like:

Controller:
public class MyController
{
public ViewResult Index() { return View();}

public ViewResult DoSomething(string action, string someData)
{
if(action == "Action1") {}
else if(action == "Action2") {}
else {/*unknown action.*/ }
}
}

xhtml:
<form action="My/DoSomething>
<input name="someData"/>

<input type='submit' name='action' value='Action1' />
<input type='submit' name='action' value='Action2' />
</form>

What I wanted was to be able to define my Controller to have multiple Actions, one for each submit action on a Form, like this:

public class MyController
{
public ViewResult Index() {return View();}

public ViewResult Action1(string someData) {return View();}
public ViewResult Action2(string someData) {return View();}
}

But alas, with MVC I couldn't construct a Route that would do this; MVC routing always uses the Forms action attribute to decide which Controller method to call.

In the end the answer wasn't that hard. I just created a smarter IRouteHander, and applied it to the MVC default route.
The HTML for the form looks almost the same, though I remove the Action from the Form's action attribute, since the route handler will look after that.
xhtml:
<form action="My>
<input name="someData"/>

<input type='submit' name='action' value='Action1' />
<input type='submit' name='action' value='Action2' />
</form>


Now the methods on my controller don't need 'special' arguments, and the world is a better place :D
Here is the custom RouteHandler: