Question

OK most of us develop and test the Asp.NET Web Applications in our localhost before publishing them to the production server. But to me, localhost is a pain sometimes since I cannot get the absolute path properly. Because lets say my app is located in http://localhost/MyApp/ I cannot properly get the host. I can get it with a couple of code but I like to make it more generic so whenever some other developer puts the same application in another location such as http://localhost/TheirApp, then it should work fine.

Sample Problem:

Whenever I use absolute path like this /aboutus.aspx, it causes this http://localhost/aboutus.aspx and omits MyApp. If I use relative path, then it becomes http://localhost/MyApp/IamHere.aspx/aboutus.aspx which is rather disturbing.

So if Request.Url.Authority or Request.Url.Host would return http://localhost/MyApp then we could append our url using these and find a nice solution.

An Alternative Solution:

I could do this:

if(Request.Url.Host.StartsWith("localhost"))
{
    string[] segments = Request.Url.AbsolutePath.Split("/");
    var localHost = Request.Url.Authority + "/" + segments[0];
}

then I can use localHost variable and append my path to it.

But I like to learn how you guys are dealing with such problem?

Thanks,

Answer 1

I’m not quite sure of what you are trying to achieve, but you can use the tilde (~) to refer to the web application’s root and that should solve your problem.

string url = ResolveUrl("~/aboutus.apsx");

The ASP.NET application will figure out by itself if ~ should be localhost, localhost:34534, someserver.net/Deep/Path or anything else.