Question

The web designer on a project is using Flash Gallery which loads a images.xml file. The SWF expects it to be in the same directory as the .html file. So if I am at the action /Public/Home/Gallery, it would expect the images.xml to be in at Public/Home.

How do I allow the Flash SWF to load the file? I have no access to the source code, so I cannot change the behaviour of the SWF.

Answer 1

Ouch, you should really look at alternative galleries…

There are a few problems with the one you’ve chosen:

• Access into the views folder is locked to secure the contents of server-side views
  (to stop them accidentally being downloadable as a file etc)
• With routes and action defaults there can be several URL’s to access the same page
• How does it deal with query strings?

I.e. where is it going to look given the following scenarios?

• /Home/Index
• /Home/Index/
• /Home/Index?Page=1
• /Home/Index/?Page=1

All of these point to ultimately the same action.

You could do something like this:

<system.webServer>
  <rewrite>
    <rules>
      <rule name="Rewrite images.xml" stopProcessing="true">
        <match url=".*/images.xml" />
        <action type="Rewrite" url="Content/{R:0}" />
      </rule>
    </rules>
  </rewrite>
</system.webServer>

With this rewrite a request for /Home/Index/images.xml would be rewritten (transparently to the web browser) to /Content/Home/Index/images.xml. But you still have the issue of trailing slashes, query strings, default actions.

There are plenty of awesome jquery plugins to go gallerys that are heaps better and not so fatally flawed.