ASP.NET Web Pages folder

This chapter provides information about folders and folder paths.

In ASP.NET WebPages, there are two folder structures, namely, logical folder structure and physical folder structure.

In this chapter you will learn:

Logical folder structure and physical folder structure

Virtual and physical names

Web URLs and Web paths

Logical folder structure

The following is a typical ASP.NET website folder structure:

The "Account" folder contains login and security files

"App_Data" folder contains database and data files

The "Images" folder contains images

The "Scripts" folder contains browser scripts

The "Shared" folder contains common files (such as layout and style files)

Physical folder structure

The physical folder structure of the "Images" folder in the above website on your computer might be as follows:

C:DocumentsMyWebSitesDemoImages

Virtual and physical names

Take the example above:

The virtual name for a website image might be "Images/pic31.jpg".

The corresponding physical name is "C:DocumentsMyWebSitesDemoImagespic31.jpg".

URLs and paths

The URL is used to access files on the website: //www.w3cschool.cn/html/html-tutorial.html

The URL corresponds to the physical file on the server: C:MyWebSitesw3cschoolhtmlhtml-tutorial.html

A virtual path is a shorthand representation of a physical path. If you use virtual paths, you don't need to update the paths when you change domain names or move your web pages to other servers.

The root directory of a disk drive is written as C:, but the root directory of a website is / (slash).

The virtual path of a Web folder is usually different from the physical folder.

In your code, decide between physical and virtual paths based on your coding needs.

There are 3 tools for ASP.NET folder paths: ~ operator, Server.MapPath method and Href method.

~ operator

Use the ~ operator to specify virtual paths in programming code.

If you use the ~ operator, you can move your site to a different folder or location without changing any of your code:

 var myImagesFolder = "~/images"; var myStyleSheet = "~/styles/StyleSheet.css";

Server.MapPath method

The Server.MapPath method converts the virtual path (/index.html) into a physical path that the server understands (C:DocumentsMyWebSitesDemodefault.html).

When you need to open a data file on the server, you can use this method (the data file can only be accessed by providing the complete physical path):

 var pathName = "~/dataFile.txt"; var fileName = Server.MapPath(pathName);

In the next chapter of this tutorial, you'll learn more about reading (and writing) data files on the server.

href method

The Href method converts the path used in the code into a path that the browser can understand (the browser cannot understand the ~ operator).

You can use the Href method to create paths to resources such as image files and CSS files.

This method is typically used within the <a>, <img> and <link> elements in HTML:

 @{var myStyleSheet = "~/Shared/Site.css";} <!-- This creates a link to the CSS file. --> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="@ Href(myStyleSheet)" /> <!-- Same as : --> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/Shared/Site.css" />

The Href method is a method of the WebPage object.