Relative Paths in Winforms

Question

Relative paths in C# are acting screwy for me. In one case Im handling a set of Texture2d objects to my app, its taking the filename and using this to locate the files and load the textures into Image objects. I then load an image from a relative path stored in the class file and use a relative path that needs to be relative to Content/gfx. But if i dont load these textures these relative paths will fail. How can I garuantee that my rel path wont fail? In web work all rel paths are relative to the folder the file we're working from is in, can I set it up this way and make all rel paths to root folder where my app is located?

Answer 1

If you are expecting a resource to be in the same directory as the executable file or in a sub directory of that directory, it's best to always use

string fullPath = System.IO.Path.Combine(System.IO.Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), subPath);

or if you are worried that the working directory might be wrong you can do this:

string fullPath = System.IO.Path.Combine(System.Reflection.Assembly.GetEntryAssembly().Location, subPath);

Answer 2

I recommend not using relative paths in the first place.

Use Path.Combine to turn your relative paths into absolute paths. For example, you can use this to get the full path to your startup EXE:

string exeFile = (new System.Uri(Assembly.GetEntryAssembly().CodeBase)).AbsolutePath;

Once you have that, you can get it's directory:

string exeDir = Path.GetDirectoryName(exeFile);

and turn your relative path to an absolute path:

string fullPath = Path.Combine(exeDir, "..\\..\\Images\\Texture.dds");

This will be much more reliable than trying to use relative paths.