Dynamic sitemap in ASP.NET MVC

Question

I\'m trying to create an automatic sitemap ActionResult that outputs a valid sitemap.xml file. The actual generation of the file is not a problem, but I can\'t seem to figure o

Answer 1

So, the getting of the controllers and actions seems to me to be the relatively trivial part. The hard part is being able to get all the possible parameter values that you might want to show in the urls of your sitemap. If you have a URL pattern like {controller}/{action}/{id}, then you're not going to be able to determine through reflection what the meaning of id is, or the possible values. The best you can do is determine the system type.

What occurred to me as I was looking at this is that a sitemap is really just another view of your site's data. So one random thought I had was that if you inherit from a base controller in your app, and you have a method on that base controller that has to be implemented, e.g.:

abstract ActionResult SiteMapSnippet();

Then you could create a SiteMapController which calls each of the other controllers in the solution and asks them for their snippet, and then renders them all together in one final view. Sort of a composite controller, though that's not a concept that's been added to this framework yet.