Ignoring a route in ASP.NET MVC results in a 200 not a 404

Question

We have URLs of the form

http://site/controller.mvc/action

If we accidentally write a relative URL for an image into the html (say src="imgs/img1.gif") this results in the browser making a request to:

http://site/controller.mvc/action/imgs/img1.gif

Which gets routed through to the controller but then cannot resolve to an action method.

This is fine except we would rather use routing to prevent this ever happening (so TempData doesn't get emptied and whatever).

However if we put a custom constraint in to stop this happening (using Regular Expressions) we get a 200 and an empty response rather than the expected 404. Any ideas?

Answer 1

I always prefix my images with HttpRuntime.AppDomainAppVirtualPath

Like this;

background="<%=HttpRuntime.AppDomainAppVirtualPath %>/Content/images/aqua.jpg"

Also I think your imgs folder needs to be under the Content folder.

src="/content/imgs/img1.gif

The shortcut to this is actually the "~" (tilde) character, but I prefer to write it out.

src="~/content/imgs/img1.gif"

You could also create a static variable to hold this value,

public static string VP = HttpRuntime.AppDomainAppVirtualPath;

Then on you page do it this way,

background="<%=VP%>/Content/images/aqua.jpg"

This is much easier than writting a helper to return a simple string.

Answer 2

I'd suggest you'll use a helper method, and then from there make sure to stick a slash in front of the paths (e.g. "/content/img/img1.gif").

See tip #2 at http://weblogs.asp.net/rashid/archive/2009/04/01/asp-net-mvc-best-practices-part-1.aspx