Play framework: directory listing - directory

What is the quickest way of [listing/serving files] outside of Play's public folder using the Play framework (2.3) ?
I am looking for something similar to the Directory Listing available in Apache. A simple web page that allows me to securely navigate a predefined directory and its sub-directories.
Is there anything readily available that does this?

Related

Folder organization

So I am taking a web development class and in most of my classes they’ve been teaching us to keep our files separate. For instance, I have a public folder and an includes folder. In my includes folder I have my database information and functions. So here is where my issue is: I am trying to post a site in godaddy and when I try to set it up their tech support told me I should place all my files in the public folder. Is that really true? I thought I would need to place my includes(private) folder in another place; if so, where should I be storing it?
GoDaddy may not be the best source of advice. When you SSH into your account (or use the File Manager) you should see your login dir which will IIRC have a www or html dir (and sometimes both, one symlinked to the other). Those are your public webroot/DOCROOT locations. Make a dirtree of your own as a sibling to the www/html dir and use that for your include tree.
When you need the absolute path to your directory tree in order to know where to grab your includes, you can get that from the GoDaddy admin interface - https://support.godaddy.com/help/article/58/finding-your-hosting-accounts-absolute-path

Setting up application and resource folders in sub virtual application

I am looking to use the below asp.net 4.0 web application structure but not quite sure how to achieve my result as explained below. What configuration will be needed to handle path issues for referencing both. For example ~/css/style.css needs to dig into the WEBSITE. I know I will have to create a helper for RESOURCES -- WebResourcePath("images/image1.jpg") returns full path if that works in a separate virtual directory?
Default Web Site
>SAR-GROUPS
SARGROUPS_WEBSITE
SARGROUPS_RESOURCES
All website files like aspx, js, css, etc. normal web files go in the WEBSITE folder. The RESOURCES folder will contain other files like pdfs, xml, txt, images, and files . These files will not need to be uploaded or updated during deployments and can remain untouched. When I deploy the WEBSITE I only need to delete the WEBSITE folder and copy the new precompiled folder in SAR-GROUPS again. I have to deploy like this as it is automated deployment from scrips that run so this is an xcopy deployment.
Does anyone have good practices or a working setup to achieve this. I am not looking at alternate methods unless it cannot be done or the other way is much better for auto builds.
Thanks
If the files in the SARGROUPS_WEBSITE directory need to reference resources in the SARGROUPS_RESOURCES directory then why not just make the SARGROUPS_RESOURCES virtual directory inside the SARGROUPS_WEBSITE directory? This way you can point the SARGROUPS_RESOURCES virtual directory at a physical location on the disk and delete the contents of SARGROUPS_WEBSITE without touching the resources.
So structure would be
Default Web Site
>SAR-GROUPS
SARGROUPS_WEBSITE
SARGROUPS_RESOURCES
But the physical structure could be anything
You can then reference them like
~/SARGROUPS_RESOURCES/css/style.css
*untested
EDIT
You've totally not understood my answer and/or virtual folders.
Physical structure example:
D:\Inetpub\WEBSITE
D:\Inetpub\RESOURCES
IIS structure:
IIS Root -> Site (that is a website and points to D:\Inetpub\WEBSITE)
IIS Root -> Site > Resources (that is a virtual directory and points to D:\Inetpub\RESOURCES)

How do I get the ASP.NET content relative path

Doing a project between multiple people, and a few components (web app, services app and some others). We will be storing some information inside the Content folder of the web app so it can be accessed directly from the web server with an href, however other components outside of the web app need to access this folder as well, and since we are sharing the project between multiple people using an absolute path is not an option. What options do we have?
EDIT: Trying to explain it a little better.
What i have exactly is, a web project, a "data project" which is just a dll, a "logic" project which is another dll and a services project which is an exe/service.
Both the web project and service project consumes the methods from the logic, and the logic from the data project. Being the last one the responsable for storing data (in a database) and also in the file system.
This "filesystem" path should be configurable, and we are aiming to put it into the content folder of the web project so multimedia files can be accessed directly rather than doing a byte stream.
Now in the web.config(config file of the web app), and app.config(config file of the services app) i could set the absolute path to web/content (the same for both config files) and the data dll would use it without problems. Now the main problem is that we cannot put an absolute path in the config file because each person works on a different computer with obviously different file paths. So if i could just write something like: ~/project/Web/Content rather than C:/myfolder/stuff/blabla/project/web/content in the config files, with ~ resolving the path to the project, this is what i want! Or maybe better ideas about how to share a folder with these apps without adding absolute paths hardcoded somewhere.
What you want to use is:
Server.MapPath("/Content/filepath.ext");
This will give you the absolute path of a file based on it's position within the website, in this case, from the /Content directory.
For a program external to the website, you have a couple options;
The easiest to implement might be a simple configuration value in the external program which points to the directory. My guess is you've already decided that's not ideal, but it may be the quickest way.
Alternatively, there's a Microsoft .NET assembly which gives you easy access to IIS information (I can't recall its name off the top of my head!). You could use this assembly to find the appropriate website, and retrieve its root directory. I'll see if I can find it and get an example, or maybe someone else will see this and post an answer with that information.
Please check the following method "ResolveClientUrl"
MSDN
Use the ResolveClientUrl method to return a URL string suitable for use by the client to access resources on the Web server, such as image files, links to additional pages, and so on.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.ui.control.resolveclienturl.aspx

Interacting With Folders Outside The Root/Web Directory With Dreamweaver (CS5)

Using FileZilla, I can access folders that are outside my web directory. How can I do the same with Dreamweaver so that I can edit the files and automatically save/upload all through Dreamweaver? I currently can only access the web directory.
I know how to include them with PHP, but I would like Dreamweaver to find/access them.
Thank you!
You would have to set the Site Definition (both local and remote) paths to look one level higher than you currently have it. So if the local path is
My Documents/Web Sites/This Site
you would change it to
My Documents/Web Sites/
and if the remote is:
/user/home/domain.com/
change to
/user/home/
The problem you are going to run into is that Dreamweaver doesn't work well when set like this. It assumes the Remote path is the public web root and will create all sorts of files and folders there automatically and DW expects those to be in the public root. Also, things like setting paths to includes and images automatically will start to not work as all paths will start outside of the public web root.
Best to leave it as it is and use an external FTP program to handle the files outside of the web site.
We've bumped up against this situation previously where the desire was to have the PHP include files be moved outside the public HTML directory. JCL1178's answer is absolutely conceptually correct.
The actual implementation was to duplicate the site (under "Manage Sites") and essentially create a separate site for the "includes" directory that would go one level up. So the "Root Directory" setting was normal (in our case "public_html/" in the main site and we removed "public_html/" from the Root Directory setting in the "includes" site, effectively causing the path to go one level up.
Definitely not an ideal situation/workflow, to say the least, as you'll end up with two site definitions for one site (which can cause other issues); but Dreamweaver is what it is. We were working on a project offsite that did not allow for anything other than Dreamweaver to be used, so this is what we came up with to comply.
As an added note: we were only able to implement this solution because the webhosting plan allowed us to get to the root. If you're on a webhosting plan that is strictly limited to the public directory, the whole thing will be DOA.

Deleting a directory results in application restart

I have an application with 2 directories (books and export).
If we create a book or a page of a book in the application a directory is added with the id of the page (this is for uploading resources).
If we delete a page, the page (and it's directory) is removed from the database and the filesystem.
However this resulted in a session loss (even an application restart). I've looked up some thing on google and found the following link.
It seems to be a problem in ASP.NET 2.0 (and 3.5).
We are now thinking about writing a service that will clean up the directories at night.
But there has got to be another solution for this no?
Oh and putting the directory outside the virtual directory is not an option.
Try disabling the monitoring of File System. This will prevent your session alive.
This article may be usefull for you.
Oh and putting the directory outside
the virtual directory is not an
option.
Putting the directory outside the virtual directory is the only solution I found (so far). What you can do, is to create a link (junction) in the file system so that the directory appears to be inside the virtual directory, e.g:
Our web site (virtual directory) is located at C:\projectX\website
the data directory (where we create/delete files and folders) is located at C:\projectX\data
then we create a link which makes the data folder available as C:\projectX\website\data
The link is created using the program Linkd.exe (available in the windows resource kit), with the following command:
linkd c:\projectX\website\data c:\projectX\data
Now c:\projectX\website\data is a link/junction which points to the real data directory. You can work with the link as if it were a physical directory.
E.g. in your web site you can access it using this code:
Server.MapPath("~/data")
And you can also used the windows file explorer and browse to C:\projectX\website\data. It appears just like a real directory.
There seems to be a supported hotfix which achieves the same as the article Sachin mentioned (turn off the file change notifications in a web site).
Check this article in the microsoft KB for more information.
But since you mentioned in a comment, that you do not have access to the server, I guess this will also not help in your case.
For storing data files that are frequently updated, created and deleted you need to use App_Data folder in the root of the web site. MSDN for App_Data folder states:
Contains application data files
including MDF files, XML files, as
well as other data store files. The
App_Data folder is used by ASP.NET 2.0
to store an application's local
database, which can be used for
maintaining membership and role
information.
Also check Q&A section for App_Data folder usage: App_Data folder question
I had the same problem. The solution is to externalize the session handling by using the ASP.Net State service. The only draw back is that every object you place in the session needs to be serializable, as it is transferred to the state service and back.
I currently do not have the possibility to provide further links, but google will help you, now that you know what to search for.

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