Inline Route Constraints in ASP.NET Core MVC

One of the big additions of ASP.NET MVC 5 and Web API 2 was attribute routing, which allows for specifying route templates in [Route] attributes. That way, the route to a given action was placed right next to the action itself:

public class MessagesController : ApiController
{
    [Route("messages/{messageId}")]
    public Message Get(int messageId)
    {
        // ...
    }
}

Attribute routing allows you to add inline route constraints to the parameters in the route template using the {parameter:constraint} syntax. In the above example, we could restrict the messageId parameter to match only integers, like this:

public class MessagesController : ApiController
{
    [Route("messages/{messageId:int}")]
    public Message Get(int messageId)
    {
        // ...
    }
}

If we wanted to add a second action which accepts an ID of type Guid rather than int, we could use the guid route constraint. Without the constraints, both actions would have the same route template; adding an inline constraint would allow the routing engine to differentiate between the two actions:

public class MessagesController : ApiController
{
    [Route("messages/{messageId:int}")]
    public Message Get(int messageId)
    {
        // ...
    }

    [Route("messages/{messageId:guid}")]
    public Message Get(Guid messageId)
    {
        // ...
    }
}

The int and guid inline constraints are just two of many supported route constraints. For a full list, check out Attribute Routing in ASP.NET Web API 2.

#Inline Route Constraints in Centralized Routes

In ASP.NET MVC 5 and Web API 2, inline route constraints were only supported in route templates defined within [Route] attributes. That is, you could only use inline route constraints in conjunction with attribute routing.

The centralized routing strategy, on the other hand, did not support inline route constraints. To constrain certain route parameters, you'd have to use the fourth parameter of the MapRoute or MapHttpRoute method:

routes.MapHttpRoute("Messages", "messages/{messageId}",
    new { controller = "Messages" }
    new { messageId = new IntRouteConstraint() });

Luckily, ASP.NET Core MVC supports inline constraints for routes defined using centralized routing. That means we can now define routes in our Startup.cs file like this:

routes.MapRoute("Messages", "messages/{messageId:int}",
    new { controller = "Messages", action = "Get" });

I took a look at the aspnet/Routing repository on GitHub and found the following snippet in the RouteOptions class. It shows the names and types of all constraints that are supported out of the box:

private static IDictionary<string, Type> GetDefaultConstraintMap()
{
    return new Dictionary<string, Type>(StringComparer.OrdinalIgnoreCase)
    {
        // Type-specific constraints
        { "int", typeof(IntRouteConstraint) },
        { "bool", typeof(BoolRouteConstraint) },
        { "datetime", typeof(DateTimeRouteConstraint) },
        { "decimal", typeof(DecimalRouteConstraint) },
        { "double", typeof(DoubleRouteConstraint) },
        { "float", typeof(FloatRouteConstraint) },
        { "guid", typeof(GuidRouteConstraint) },
        { "long", typeof(LongRouteConstraint) },

        // Length constraints
        { "minlength", typeof(MinLengthRouteConstraint) },
        { "maxlength", typeof(MaxLengthRouteConstraint) },
        { "length", typeof(LengthRouteConstraint) },

        // Min/Max value constraints
        { "min", typeof(MinRouteConstraint) },
        { "max", typeof(MaxRouteConstraint) },
        { "range", typeof(RangeRouteConstraint) },

        // Regex-based constraints
        { "alpha", typeof(AlphaRouteConstraint) },
        { "regex", typeof(RegexInlineRouteConstraint) },

        { "required", typeof(RequiredRouteConstraint) },
    };
}

We can constrain route parameters to be of a certain type, have a given length, be in a specified range, or match a given regular expression — all of that inline, directly in the route template. Sweet!