Re: Virtual Directory, Paths, Local and Deployed Problem

From: Ken Dopierala Jr. (kdopierala2_at_wi.rr.com)
Date: 09/30/04 

Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2004 14:57:00 -0500

Hi,

I think you are looking at the situation totally wrong:

> Locally: /site1/images/mygif.gif
> In production: /images/mygif.gif

If you are looking to get to the /images folder from the root. Let's say
localhost/site, you would use the exact same path that you have for your In
production entry. Because your web app is running from the site1 virtual
directory that is your root. /site1 really has nothing to do with anything,
it is your root directory and should never be referenced. Basically it
comes down to this. In the example you gave that I quoted above you are
comparing apples to oranges. They do not match and don't equal each other.
There are two ways you can write the quoted lines above to be equal:

Way 1 (not a good way of doing it):
Locally: /site1/images/mygif.gif
In production: http://www.site1.com/images/mygif.gif

Way 2 (this is the correct way)
Locally: /images/mygif.gif
In production: /images/mygif.gif

As you can see they are identical, there is no need to reference /site1 at
all. To test this out put a test image in your Default.aspx file and place
the image in your /images folder. Reference the image with an image tag and
set the source to "/images/mygif.gif". Run it locally from your /site1,
your /bin folder should be in your /site1 folder. When you run it the image
will display. Now deploy it to production. Once again your image will
display. I run over a dozen web sites locally that I have created and
deploy to different URLs. I'm not sure where you get the limitation that
W2K or XP only lets you run one website. You could run as many as you have
disk space for.

You may be setting up your solutions wrong. When you create an ASP.Net
solution this is the recommended way of doing so:

Create a MyProjects folder, make this a virtual folder in IIS.
Create a WebAppNameSystem folder, this will contain everything for that
particular site.
Create a new blank solution and name it WebAppNameSolution and have VS.Net
create it in the WebAppNameSystem folder.
In the solution create a project for your web app. I always name this
project the domain name of the site I am creating.
Once you do this IIS will automatically create this virtual folder for you
in IIS and the physical folder will reside inside the WebAppNameSolution
folder.
Now, in the project create your Images folder and all the other folders you
want. When you run your app it will be as if you are running it from the
root of the production site. No paths will ever need to be changed, if they
work locally they will work in production. That is all there is to it. By
the way, nothing we have talked about has anything to do with Client-Side.
Even though you are running it locally, it just means that your server is
local. Client-side means that the browser itself is executing code that
runs on the client. Good luck! Ken. 

-- 
Ken Dopierala Jr.
For great ASP.Net web hosting try:
http://www.webhost4life.com/default.asp?refid=Spinlight
"nick" <nickgieschen@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:305cab98.0409301055.4484cd4c@posting.google.com...
> I think you misunderstood.
>
> I'm not pointing the browser to folders on the client machines, but on
> the server. Just normal referencing of an "image" dir, for example.
> The problem is that on my development machine on which IIS limits you
> to one website all my sites have the url
>
> localhost/site1
> localhost/site2
> localhost/site3
>
> on the production machine they are
>
> www.site1.com
> www.site2.com
> www.site3.com
>
> As you can see from this, the root of the site is at a different depth
> on each of the machines. So, in order to reference an image in an
> images directory in the root the path would be:
>
> Locally: /site1/images/mygif.gif
> In production: /images/mygif.gif
>
> So, if I code for one, it'll break on the other.
>
> I've searched the groups and found a few people mentioning this
> problem, but I'm surprised that it's not a bigger deal.
>
> Of course, if M$ would let us have more than one site on IIS on XP or
> W2K things would be peachy. As it is, developers are forced to develop
> their sites locally with a different structure than that in
> production, something which is a severe drawback IMHO.
>
> "Ken Dopierala Jr." <kdopierala2@wi.rr.com> wrote in message
news:<#zRFgQYpEHA.1816@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl>...
> > Hi,
> >
> > What kind of project are you making that you are pointing the browser to
> > local resources in a specific directory?  Do you actually go to each one
of
> > your client machines and create this directory structure?  If that is
the
> > case, you might want to just add to that workload.  Create a text file
that
> > you give to the client and copy it to their machine while you are
creating
> > all these directories.  Have that text file hold the correct paths for
each
> > client and then use those.  Good luck!  Ken.
> >
> > -- 
> > Ken Dopierala Jr.
> > For great ASP.Net web hosting try:
> > http://www.webhost4life.com/default.asp?refid=Spinlight
> >
> > "nick" <nickgieschen@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> > news:305cab98.0409280841.666dcdfb@posting.google.com...
> > > I have a problem and I've been using a cheezy work around and was
> > > wondering if anyone else out there has a better solution.
> > >
> > > The problem:
> > >
> > > Let's say I have a web application appA. Locally, I set it up as
> > > C:\domains\appA. Locally, my IIS root points to C:\domains. I don't
> > > point it to C:\domains\appA since if I have an appB under C:\domains I
> > > wouldn't be able to get to it. So to access it via my browser I go to
> > > localhost/appA.
> > >
> > > When deployed, the IIS website's root points not to domains, but one
> > > directory deeper to appA. This is because I don't want to type
> > > www.appA.com/appA, but just www.appA.com.
> > >
> > > So, the above is the typical way of setting up web projects with
> > > ASP.NET when you've got a local version and a final version on a
> > > server somewhere.
> > >
> > > The problem is with virual paths in the browser. If I want to point to
> > > an image locally which is in C:\domains\appA\images\myImage.gif in the
> > > client side code I write "/appA/images/myImage.gif". Obviously this
> > > doesn't work when deployed since the path from the root is different.
> > > Rather, the correct path is "/images/myImage.gif".
> > >
> > > The work around I've used is locally to switch the root of my website
> > > everytime I want to work on a different project so that the structure
> > > of the site mirrors that of the site when deployed. This is obviously
> > > a big pain in the ***.
> > >
> > > The problem would go away if M$ allowed more than one website in IIS
> > > in non-server versions of their OS, but, well, they don't. That's one
> > > of the joys I've had doing PHP development on Apache - no screwing
> > > around with in IIS every time I want to work on a different site
> > > locally.
> > >
> > > So, does anyone have better solutions that the one I've been using?
> > >
> > > I realize I could dynamically generate the paths server side, but,
> > > well, that's a pretty cheezy solution.
> > >
> > > Oh yeah, and please remember I'm talking about _client_ side paths. I
> > > know already about ~/directoryName on the server.