ASP MVC Friendly URL's and Relative Path Images

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC page, where I am trying to show friendly URL's.

So, I have a Category View in the Home Controller, that accepts a categoryKey value to get the content of the page.

For instance: http://localhost/Home/Category/Bikes gets the bike content.

in my Global.asax.cs, i have the following to handle this:

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
  routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

  routes.MapRoute(
      "Category",
      "{controller}/{action}/{categoryKey}",
      new { controller = "Home", action = "Category", categoryKey = "" });

  routes.MapRoute(
      "Default", // Route name
      "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
      new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
  );
}

This works just fine, and it gets the content, however, I am getting the content from a Content Management system, for easy editing. When you add an image on the content management, it adds the image with a relative path:

<img src="../AdminUploadContent/bikes.gif" alt="Bikes" />

Now, if i goto "http://localhost/Home/Category", and that image tag is on the base page, it will pull up the image. However, if i goto "http://localhost/Home/Category/", or add the actual category of "/Home/Category/Bikes"/, the image doesn't show up. The properties of the image is pointing to "http://localhost/Home/AdminUploadContent/bikes.gif".

Is there anything I can put in my Global.aspx.cs file to handle the relative path? Even if i manually edit the content management to add ../../AdminUploadContent/bikes.gif, it is chopping off the first ../, since it is doing some validation.

Answer 1

You can use the relative path " ~/ " to refer to the current virtual directory where the page is located. Try to add runat="server" attribute to your "img" tag and "~" sign in "src" attribute:

<img runat="server" src="~/AdminUploadContent/bikes.gif" alt="Bikes" />

Answer 2

Use the Url.Content method when generating a path to your image. For example:

<img src="<%= Url.Content("~/AdminUploadContent/bikes.gif") %>" />