URL rewriting in asp.net MVC 4

URL Rewriting is the practice of "faking" a URL by rewriting it to look like another URL. It does so in a single direction. This means it is has no built-in way to generate a URL for use on the UI.

.NET Routing is what MVC applications typically use. It is a real, not faked 2-way mapping from URL to a set of route values and/or a set of route values to a URL. This means that you can easily generate URLs for use within the application using HTML helpers such as ActionLink, and as such is the recommended and preferred approach for building custom URLs from within the application.

Sometimes both of these techniques are used, but URL rewriting is generally only put in place to do things that make sense to change from outside of the compiled application, such as when nesting the application within another application or putting in one-way 301 redirects for legacy URLs.

To answer your question, yes it can be done, but should be done with .NET routing, not URL rewriting. To use names like this, you need a mapping between name and ID. A couple of ways this could be done:

1. Make a Name-ID mapping right in your route configuration by using static route segments with the name and route values that contain the related ID. This approach will work only if your URLs don't need to be changed dynamically within the application.
2. Use a Name-ID map within a cached dictionary object. Use a custom RouteBase implementation to do mapping in each direction by overriding the GetRouteData and GetVirtualPath methods.