Question

I’m integrating a JavaScript library into an ASP.NET MVC3 web app. The library assumes it will be installed next to the page that references it, and so it uses document-relative URLs to find its components.

For example, the default directory layout looks like

container-page.html
jslibrary/
    library.js
    images/
        icon.png
    extensions/
        extension.js
        extension-icon.png

However, I want to reference the library from the view in /Home/edit. I install the library in the default Scripts\jslibrary\ When I reference the library in the view in Views\Home\edit.cshtml, the library’s document-relative links like

images/icon.png 

end up as requests to

http://localhost/Home/images/icon.png

which results in a File Not Found (404) error. How do I construct a route to look for

{anyControllerName}/images/{anyRemainingPathInfo}

and serve up

http://localhost/Scripts/jslibrary/images/{anyRemainingPathInfo} 

?

(full disclosure: I’m still on IIS 6 in Production, and not much chance of going to IIS7 any time soon, so if this is better done at the IIS level, please account for IIS6. Thanks!)

Answer 1

Short of rewriting the library and having it check for the appropriate directory the only solution I can think of is to include the views, library and supporting files in a directory structure that the library can access. This of course would break MVC’s convention over configuration way of finding views, so you would have to write a custom override of the way Razor looks for views, which is not too complex to do, but you might be making life more difficult for yourself down the road depending on your application. Your call which is the lesser of the two evils 🙂 (I’d go for fixing the library)