.Net MVC route for undetermined number of folders (nested category structure) - regex

Question

I'm exploring the possibility of using MVC for my next e-commerce site. One thing I can't seem to figure out is whether or not I can use the same URL convention I normally use. Currently, the URL for any product could be one of the following:
Category/SubCategory/Product1.html
Category/SubCategory/SubSubCategory/Product2.html
Category/SubCategory/SubSubCategory/Product3.html
Category/SubCategory/SubSubCategory/SubSubSubCategory/Product4.html
etc.
The issue I'm having is with the nested category structure. So far the only thing I've come up with is as follows:
routes.MapRoute(
"Products",
"{categories}/{productname}",
new { controller = "Product", action = "Details", productname = UrlParameter.Optional },
new { categories = #"\w+/\w+" }
);
I was hoping that {categories} could be matched with any one of the following which I could process to identify the right category that the product belongs to:
Sport/Tennis/Rackets/ProductA
Sport/Badminton/Rackets/ProductB
But the route shown above doesn't work correctly.
Does anyone know how this can be achieved, or if it can't be done?

Answer 1

The routing system allows you to define catchall parameters, which ignore slashes and capture
everything up to the end of a URL. Designate a parameter as being catchall by prefixing it with an
asterisk (*).
routes.MapRoute(null, "Articles/{*articlePath}",
new { controller = "Articles", action = "Show" }
);
You can only have one catchall parameter in a URL pattern, and it must be the last (i.e.,
rightmost) thing in the URL, since it captures the entire URL path from that point onward.
One Caveat though, it doesn’t capture anything from the query string as route objects only look at the
path portion of a URL.
Catchall parameters are useful if you’re letting visitors navigate through some kind of arbitrary
depth hierarchy, such as in a content management system (CMS).
You can use the RouteData object to extract information about the route. For your needs, you would probably create a custom route handler that parses the route data and calls the correct controller methods.

Answer 2

You need access to the individual segments of the URL so you need to divide the category segment into two segments. That would make it much easier.
Let's say we call Tennis and Badminton categories and Rackets within those categories as a product class
You need a way to access the category, productClass and productName parameters. Supposing that "Sport" is fixed in this case, I will do it like this:
routes.MapRoute(
"Products",
"sport/{category}/{productClass}/{productName}",
new { controller = "Product", action = "Details", productClass = UrlParameter.Optional, productName = UrlParameter.Optional }
);
Your action method will be something like this
public ActionResult Details(string category, string productClass, string productName){
//Do whatever you need to do in order to get the specified product
}

Answer 3

You could use Areas in MVC2
So it would read:
Area/Controller/View/id
So in your case it would end up being:
Sport being the area,
Tennis The controller,
Rackets the view,
ProductA being an ID or querystring,
http://www.asp.net/mvc/videos/aspnet-mvc-2-areas
Hope this makes sense.