Asp.net MVC routing does a fine job with routes that have a finite number of segments. We define them with route URL pattern string. The default provided by the Asp.net MVC project template being {controller}/{action}/{id}. Most web applications can do everything using only this single route definition and many developers don't even think beyond this standard. But sometimes this single route just isn't enough or it's just not acceptable.
A real world example
Think of a web site you're building that has hierarchically organised categories. Like Amazon. We have books, music, electronics, etc. And every top category has sub categories. And so on and so forth. Using default route definition we would access a particular (sub)category simply by:
www.domain.com/categories/index/647
That's fine, but it's definitely not human friendly. If we'd change our route URL definition to {controller}/{action}/{id}/{name} this would already be much friendlier:
www.domain.com/categories/index/647/web-development
That's something similar (not the same, because we're still using action names here) to what Stackoverflow does with it's questions.
But now think of this super human readable web address:
www.domain.com/books/computer-internet/web-development/latest
This one would display latest web development books. As we can see it defines categories in hierarchical order similar to breadcrumbs. All in human readable format. Doing this kind of routing isn't supported out of the box (because we have an action at the end), but I think we could do better. Let's try and create a route that supports this.
