Question

I am continually testing the new feature of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 called: “Areas within one project”.
Currently I have a problem with linking to css and js files from within aspx code.

When the url points to an url without the id, everything works fine:

http://mysite.com/area/controller/action

The problem appears when the url contains the parameter:

http://mysite.com/admin/controller/action/id

then the page cannot find css and js files from /content and /scripts.

I think the problem is related to routing. I have standard routing rules set, eg:

        routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

        AreaRegistration.RegisterAllAreas();

        routes.MapRoute(
            "Default",                                              // Route name
            "{controller}/{action}/{id}",                           // URL with parameters
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }  // Parameter defaults
        );

and in the area’s route config:

        public override void RegisterArea(AreaRegistrationContext context)
    {
        context.MapRoute(
            "admin_default",
            "Admin/{controller}/{action}/{id}",
            new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = "" }
            );
    }

An example resource href in aspx file:

    <link href="../../Content/datatables.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Can anyone suggest a solution to resolve the problem of bad resource href?

Answer 1

When you are using URL routing, you don’t know how/many/path/parts there are going to be in your URL in advance. So you can’t use path-relative URLs at all: you don’t know how many ‘..’ segments you are going to need.

Instead, use rooted URLs:

<link href="/Content/datatables.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

If your application can be mounted on a non-root URL (eg. under one of your area​s, you must output that area name as part of the rooted URL. (Presumably this is obtained using AreaRegistrationContext.AreaName.)