Routing and multiple views in Asp.Net MVC - asp.net-mvc-3

Question

I have a controller action method that needs to be able to serve multiple views. These views are generated by XSLT.
Now, the views have images in them (hundreds each), and each view needs to have its own folder with images to refer to. How should this work?
If the images in the source XML has an href that is a simple relative path ("images/image.svg"), how can I get this path to resolve in the view in the application?
If I could put the images folder in the same folder as the view, and use a relative path there, it would be easy, but that doesn't work, because I'm serving multiple views from the action. Here is the routing:
routes.MapRoute(
"Parameter",
"{controller}/{action}/{lang}/{prod}",
new { controller = "Manuals", action = "Product", lang = "en-US", prod = "sample" }
);
So if I try using a relative path for the img src attribute, it resolves to something like "/Manuals/Product/en-US/images/image.svg"
And in fact, if I put it relative to the view, the image is located in "/Views/Manuals/en-US/images/image.svg"
So is there no way to have relative image paths like this in Asp.Net MVC? Or am I misunderstanding MVC routing completely?

Answer 1

This is what I have done before:
public class MvcApplication : HttpApplication
{
public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)
{
filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute());
}
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");
MapRoute(routes, "", "Home", "Index");
/* other routes */
MapRoute(routes, "{*url}", "Documentation", "Render");
}
}
Now any routes that are not matched are passed to the DocumentationController. My documentation controller looks as follows:
public class DocumentationController : Controller
{
public ActionResult Render(string url)
{
var md = new MarkdownSharp.Markdown();
// The path is relative to the root of the application, but it can be anything
// stored on a different drive.
string path = Path.Combine(Request.MapPath("~/"), GetAppRelativePath().Replace('/', '\\')) + ".md";
if (System.IO.File.Exists(path))
{
string html = md.Transform(System.IO.File.ReadAllText(path));
return View("Render", (object)html);
}
// return the not found view if the file doesn't exist
return View("NotFound");
}
private string GetAppRelativePath()
{
return HttpContext.Request.AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath.Replace("~/", "");
}
}
All this does is to find markdown files and render them accordingly. To update this for your case, you may want to do the following:
routes.MapRoute(
"Parameter1",
"{controller}/{action}/{lang}/{*url}",
new { controller = "Manuals", action = "Download", lang = "en-US", prod = "sample" }
);
Make sure it is after the {controller}/{action}/{lang}/{prod} route. This should cause a URL such as /Manuals/Product/en-US/images/image.svg or even images/image.svg (if the browser is in /Manuals/Product/en-US/sample to invoke the the Download action. You can then adapt the code I wrote to map that URI to the physical location. A problem you may run into is that "images" are considered to be product and that /Manuals/Product/en-US/images would think its a product.
The Images action can be can look as follows.
public ActionResult Download(string url)
{
/* figure out physical path */
var filename = /* get filename form url */
var fileStream = [...];
Response.Headers.Remove("Content-Disposition");
Response.Headers.Add("Content-Disposition", "inline; filename=" + filename);
string contentType = "image/jpg";
return File(fileStream, contentType, filename);
}
You can get more information of the FileResult at MSDN.