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When building a multi-lingual website (with ASP.NET web forms), I'll use an HTTP module to rewrite the URLs to end up with something friendly (for humans & search engines) like:


My (newbie) understanding of MVC is that the URL should take the format of

Controller / Action / Identifier

so replicating the functionality above with MVC will end up with URLs similar to:



  • Can I insert a country code into the URL before the 'controller' segment?
  • Is it possible to map 'products' and 'productos' to the same controller?

Thanks for your help

Edit: In addition to Panos' answer below I found more information on the ASP.NET Website.

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2 Answers 2

up vote 8 down vote accepted

The URL can take almost any other form you like. For more info, check ASP.NET MVC Framework (Part 2): URL Routing. Just for starting (since I am not sure if it is the optimum solution), you can add two new routes in your global.asax:

            new { lang = "uk", controller = "Products", action = "Index", id = "", subcategory = "" }
            new { lang = "es", controller = "Products", action = "Index", id = "", subcategory = "" }

These routes understand the following URLs (and map both of them to the ActionResult Category(string id, string subcategory) method of ProductsController):


If you want to create such URLs in your views you can use something like:

<%= Html.RouteLink("English 1.A", "ukRoute", new { lang = "uk", action = "Category", id = "1", subcategory = "A" })%>
<%= Html.RouteLink("Spanish 1.A", "esRoute", new { lang = "es", action = "Category", id = "1", subcategory = "A" })%>
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does it works? uk/Products/Category/1/A es/Productos/Category/1/A In both these scenarios it will be directed to the first Route ukRoute since lang is a string field and match. –  Saanch Apr 17 '13 at 10:15
I think the method introduced in this blog is a better idea. –  VahidND Feb 6 at 9:14

You can do this, but keep in mind that not all countries are languages. For example, en-gb is the usual representation for British English, or more specifically, the Great Britain locale for English content, for example. If you can, it's worth following the RFC1766-derived conventions for language-LOCALE.

Search engines actually tend to do a fairly good job dealing with content-negotiation, by the way, so you need not necessarily have separate URIs for the same content in different languages. Google Japan will crawl with ja-JP as the accept language header, for example.

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Regarding search engines you should emit the "lang" and "dir" attributes on the "html" element. I prefer the cookie method which can all be dealt with in the Global.asax code (or even wrapped into a parent HttpApplication base class to fully automate for any MVC or ASPX web site) by saving a "culture" cookie at AquireRequestState (with browser or web site default language) which is easy to change to any preference via a "SetLanguage" application method which just changes the cookie and thread culture. Then the site works without different URLs and the content valid (identifies its language). –  Code Chief Jan 24 '13 at 10:22

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