Question

I want to start serving up my static content from a subdomain in production. What is the best way to do this while maintaining a smooth development experience in Visual Studio? Up until this point, I didn’t have to worry about URLs and I would simply use:

<script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.someScript.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>

When I was local, it would automatically map to http://localhost/myApp/Scripts/jquery.someScript.js and when I went to production, it would automatically map to http://www.myDomain.com/Scripts/jquery.someScript.js. I wouldn’t have to do anything to manage the URLs.

My first instinct would be to use some AppSettings in my web.config and specify HostName and StaticHostName but that would break my usage of Url.Content.

What are some best practices around solving this issue?

Answer 1

Somewhere, you will need to use a configuration setting to indicate which behaviour you require in a given environment (I suppose you could use the IsDebuggingEnabled property but a custom configuration setting is more flexible).

I can think of two possible techniques.

Option 1

You could write your own extension method for UrlHelper that picks up the relevant configuration setting. Your view code would then be insulated from knowledge of the configuration, e.g.:

<script src="@Url.StaticContent("~/Scripts/jquery.someScript.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>

Here’s an example implementation (untested):

public static class UrlHelperExtensions
{
    public static string StaticContent(this UrlHelper urlHelper, string contentPath)
    {
        if (!VirtualPathUtility.IsAppRelative(contentPath))
        {
            throw new ArgumentException("Only use app relative paths");
        }

        // TODO: Further checks required - e.g. the path "~" passes the above test

        if (UseRemoteServer)
        {
            // Remove the initial "~/" from the content path
            contentPath = contentPath.Substring(2);
            return VirtualPathUtility.Combine(RemoteServer, contentPath);
        }

        return urlHelper.Content(contentPath);
    }

    private static string RemoteServer
    {
        get
        {
            // TODO: Determine based on configuration/context etc
            return null;
        }
    }

    private static bool UseRemoteServer
    {
        get
        {
            return !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(RemoteServer);
        }
    }
}

Option 2

An alternative might be to use something like Combres but modify the configuration per-environment by transforming Combres’ XML configuration file.