Sitecore MVC Routing and Virtual Folders

Question

I have a multi-site Sitecore instance with several sites defined using the physicalFolder/virtualFolder attributes defined on the <site> nodes all done with MVC. There is some functionality I would like to add to a page in a more native-MVC fashion where I can invoke the controller thru Javascript and update the DOM elements on the response with the updated html from the controller (ie: /api/sitecore/search/results). The issue I am seeing, since I am inoking the controller directly/natively, it's a bit outside the Sitecore execution pipeline so I have no handle on the Sitecore.Context.Site. Ultimately, what I would like is to do make the routing respect the virtual folder so I can at least get a handle on the SiteContext (ie: /site1/api/sitecore/search/results).

Answer 1

What I ended up doing is registering a single route on pipelines/initialize:

<pipelines>
    <initialize>
        <processor type="MyFramework.Routing.RegisterVirtualFoldersRoutes, MyFramework" patch:before="processor[@type='Sitecore.Mvc.Pipelines.Loader.InitializeRoutes, Sitecore.Mvc']" />
    </initialize>
</pipelines>

and in the pipeline itself:

namespace MyFramework.Routing
{
    public class RegisterVirtualFoldersRoutes
    {
        public virtual void Process(PipelineArgs args)
        {
            RouteTable.Routes.MapRoute("VirtualFolderRouting", "{virtualFolder}/api/sitecore/{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { id = UrlParameter.Optional });
        }
    }
}

Without any additional customization this allowed me to invoke /site1/api/sitecore/search/results or /site2/api/sitecore/search/results directly and get the SiteContext of the site respective of the virtualFolder. I assume there may be some collisions between the virtualfolder/api/sitecore and other defined routes, but none of them come to mind currently.