Can Areas in an ASP.NET MVC 2 application map to a subdomain?

Question

Is there a way to map the Areas within an ASP.NET MVC 2 application to subdomains such as

movies.example.com/Theater/View/2

instead of

Answer 1

I've tried a lot of the solutions mentioned on other threads and found things getting too complicated very quickly. It seems like ASP.Net MVC wants you to sub-class Route to do this kind of advanced routing, but it never seemed to work for me. I was never able to get a domain to map to a namespace, so I wound up with "ambiguous controller" exceptions (since I had a home controller in both namespaces).

Ultimately I used a constraint to point sub-domains to namespaces.

Here's what my route looks like. Notice that this route is for the "api." sub-domain:

        context.MapRoute(
            "Api_Default",
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional },
            new { controller = new SubdomainRouteConstraint("api.") },
            new[] { "BendyTree.CloudSpark.Areas.Api.Controllers" }
            );

Here's the "SubdomainRouteConstraint" class referenced above:

public class SubdomainRouteConstraint : IRouteConstraint
{
    private readonly string SubdomainWithDot;

    public SubdomainRouteConstraint(string subdomainWithDot)
    {
        SubdomainWithDot = subdomainWithDot;
    }

    public bool Match(HttpContextBase httpContext, Route route, string parameterName, RouteValueDictionary values, RouteDirection routeDirection)
    {
        return new Regex("^https?://" + SubdomainWithDot).IsMatch(httpContext.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri);
    }
}

It's obviously quite a hack, but I'm really happy with how simple it ended up.

You could easily tweek this code to dynamically map a subdomain to an area, but I only have two areas so I just register each area separately. Plus this gives me the freedom to have different routing inside each area.