Recommended API design with ASP.NET MVC3 - asp.net-mvc-3

Question

I'm working with ASP.NET MVC 3. I'm kind of new to it. I think I'm starting to get the hang of it. But there is something that I'm trying to do, that I think makes sense, but maybe I'm wrong.
I'm trying to create an API around Order objects in my database. In order to get all of the orders in the system, I was going to expose an API that looks like the following:
/orders/
In cases where I wanted to get a specific Order, I would simply append an ID. In other words, the URL would look like this:
/orders/12345
In an effort to accomplish this, I created the following controller:
public class OrdersController : Controller
{
// GET: /Orders/
[AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Get)]
public ActionResult Index()
{
string result = "list of orders";
return Json(result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}
//
// GET: /Orders/{orderID}
public ActionResult Index(int id)
{
string result = "order:" + id;
return Json(result, JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
}
}
In my AreaRegistration class, I have the following:
public override void RegisterArea(AreaRegistrationContext context)
{
context.MapRoute(
"OrderList",
"{controller}/{action}",
new { action = "Index", controller="Orders" }
);
context.MapRoute(
"Order",
"{controller}/{action}/{id}",
new { action = "Index", controller = "Orders" }
);
}
When I attempted to access "/orders/", via the browser address bar, I get the JSON like I would expect. However, if I attempt to access "/orders/12345", I receive a 404. What am I missing?
Thank you

Answer 1

You need to also define proper routes in global.asax or use the default route which looks like {controller}/{action}/{id} where controller is defaulted to "Home", action is defaulted to "Index" and id is optional.
So /orders works because you have defined controller (orders), default action (Index) and missing id (which doesn't matter as it is optional)
But when you try /orders/12345 then you have defined controller (orders), action (12345) and missing id
So to make this work with only the default route the request should be /orders/index/12345
edit: for registering area routes you should use AreaRegistration class