How to handle stylesheet links when local and server directory structures don't match - css

The document root of my website is directly the server webroot (public_html), and not in a separate subdirectory. This creates a problem for me, because my local website is in a project folder (which is required by my editor, NetBeans), which means that href links to stylesheets need to be of the form:
/projectfolder/stylesheets/stylesheet.css
But on the server, since the website is directly in the webroot, the href url would have to be:
/stylesheets/stylesheet.css
When I asked my host about this, they said I would have to refactor my project to change all the stylesheet links. But I don't know; it seems kind of funny to have to refactor (then "unrefactor") the local website every time I want to upload it to the server. Any other solutions out there?

You don't have to use absolute paths to your stylesheets. Use relative paths instead. Then it won't matter where your files are hosted, so long as they stay in the same positions relative to each other.

Related

Is there a way to serve a directory using map local and Charles?

I have a network request in the form of:
http://www.blahblah.com/folder/version/dist
I would like to add a rule to the Map Local option in Charles, in order to serve a directory that looks like:
Users/me/Documents/code/project/dist
The file structure of both dist folders are the same. My current request rule is: http://www.blahblah.com/folder/*/dist, and I'm asking it to serve Users/me/Documents/code/project/dist in its place, however, the files still come from the original requested resource.
Is there a way to proxy a whole directory?
You should be able to do so, by what is said in the CharlesProxy documentation:
If you are testing css, swf or image changes you can map those file types to your local development copy of the website so you can browse the live site with all your development assets. Create a mapping from live.com/*.css to the root of your local development copy, and similar mappings for the other file types. Alternatively you can map whole directories or individual files as required.
I guess your problem might be on the path where you are trying to map from. I would say you need to add an asterisk at the end of your path, something like:
http://www.blahblah.com/folder/*/dist/*
You can try to add the .css as done in the example
http://www.blahblah.com/folder/*/dist/*.css

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.

How might i setup my ASP.NET project to find my files?

edit I do not want to redirect pages, specific files etc. I would like to change the path where images, videos and other media are stored from the root source directory to the directory of my choosing. In this case c:/dev/prjfiles/prjname/public (c:/dev/prjfiles/prjname/ is my working directory) and i except when my html does img src="/pic.png" it will find the image in c:/dev/prjfiles/prjname/publi/pic.png. I need a working solution, i tried looking at how to set virtual directories and etc. I cant figure it out. Thus the bounty. I am generating the html, i am not writing asp:image runat="server" etc i am pulling data from a DB and outputing the html. The part that is still a WIP is the code that handles POST request. The html already exist but i cant have hundreds of files in site.com/here pollution my source directory (c:/dev/trunk/thisprj/thisprj/where my .aspx files are and i do not wish 500 .png/gif/jpg here)
I dont know how asp.net environments are usually set up. I am assuming i have a root path that is not available from the web, a bin/ where i may put my asp.net dll and a public where i stick in any files i want.
I would like to have my project files seperated from everything else. My JS, css and image files are in prjfiles/prjname/public with my sqlite db in prjfiles/prjname/ and extra binaries in prjfiles/prjname/bin.
The problem comes when i run my app and try to load an image. Such as /cssimg/error.png. My project does not find resource in my /public folder and i have no idea how to make it find them. How can i set my project up so it does?
NOTE: I set the working directory path so its at prjfiles/prjname/. In code i write ./bin/extrabin.exe and db.sqlite3 which access the files properly.
You might want to watch the getting started videos for ASP.NET
http://www.asp.net/get-started/
EDIT: More info added
As #Murph suggests, your assumptions are incorrect.
IIS takes care of blocking HTTP access to any important files and folders like your *.aspx.cs, and *.cs in the App_Code, any DLLs, anything under the App_Data directory and the web.config.
Content files, such as *.html, *.css, *.js, .gif, .jpg, .png are all served in the normal manner.
In this way, there is no need for a "public" folder.
I dont know how asp.net environments are usually set up. I am assuming i have a root path that is not available from the web, a bin/ where i may put my asp.net dll and a public where i stick in any files i want.
This is wrong assumption!
You have a root folder, which IS available in public. You set IIS or ASP.NEt Development Server to this folder.
(optional, but always needed) You have a web.config file in this root folder for configuration
You have a bin folder for your assemblies (each page or user control "include" compiles to a class)
(optional) You have App_Data as default folder for file-based DBs and/or other data files (say XML storage, ..)
(optional) You have an App_theme folder for styling and images. Read about ASP.NET themes.
(optional) You can add App_Code folder if you want to add classes to be compiled by the server.
You can create folders for scripts, etc...
Normally for complex logic, etc.. you create in a separate project outside the root and reference the result assembly in the bin folder.
Seriously, you cannot do ASP.NET work without an IDE or a manual. Visual Web Developer 2008 Express IDE is free and http://asp.net has tons of resources for getting started.
I don't know if I got the question right, but maybe you could try the <BASE> HTML tag.
HTML <base> Tag
"Specify a default URL and a default target for all links on a page"
There's a nice and simple example at W3Schools, check it out.
The negative side is that you need to put a <BASE> tag in each page you want.
It sounds like you should be able to create a virtual directory to do what you're asking -- but it's a very non-standard setup.
Keep in mind that IIS will prevent users from downloading DLLs and other project-level files, so you usually don't need to partition them off in a separate layer.
For example, just have a cssimg folder at the top level of your project, and skip the whole public folder thing.
I see where you're coming from. ASP.NET projects are set up a little differently from how you're treating them, but you can make them work like you want.
The root of an ASP.NET project IS publicly accessible. When you created your WebSite within Visual Studio, it created a default.aspx page right on the root. Are you hosting in IIS? If so, it's set up to serve up default.aspx by default. But I digress.
Here's how to make it work like you want (mostly):
Create a WebSite, then right-click the site and add a folder named "prjfiles". Right-click that folder and make another named "public". Create another subfolder of that one called "cssimg".
Now, if you want to use the image you mentioned, you'd reference it like this: "~/prjfiles/public/cssimg/error.png" (pathing starting with the root) or "./cssimg/error.png" if you're coming from a page in the public folder (relative pathing).
Really, though, you're doing too much work. Here's how to make it work with less effort:
Create your WebSite, right-click the project and add a folder called "cssimg".
Treat the root as you would the "public" folder- put your pages right there on the root or in subfolders, as needed. You can reference that same image file like this now: "./cssimg/error.png" (relative) or "~/cssimg/error.png" (start from root)
There's also another way to tell the engine where to look for resources, but it's for your css files. Inside the "head" tag, you can add a "style" element (with type="text/css") and inside that you can add something like this: #import '<%= ResolveUrl("~/prjfiles/public/cssimg/styles.css") %>';
Good luck!
If I correctly understood your problem, you're trying to find files which aren't physically stored on a filesystem folder, or stay on a different folder. You can deal with this problems by implementing a UrlRewrite mechanism.
I suggest you to read URL Rewriting in ASP.NET and, after, to take a look into this implementation: A Complete URL Rewriting Solution for ASP.NET 2.0.
If I understand all this correctly (please comment with any correction) right now all your files are together in the root directory and you use <img src="/img.png" /> and it works.
If this is the case, make another directory in the directory the images are in, say call that directory images and put the image files there. now use <img src="/images/img.png" />.
Done.

asp includes with absolute path

is there anyway to do a #include with a file listed as an absolute path?
i am trying to include files from other websites (outsite the root of the sight that wants to include it)
any other suggestions?
You can only include files from your server, these may technically be outside your website if the Allow Parent Paths option is enabled or if you can use a virtual include to point to another virtual directory on your server.
There is no way to include files from websites outside of your server or sites on your server that your application does not have permissions to access.
Another way to go is to create a directory below the root folder of your website, then making that folder a symbolic link to the folder where the file you want to include is located. Now there is no way to create symbolic links in Windows out of the box, you need Microsoft Sysinternals Junction for that.
<!--#include file="c:\boot.ini"-->
There is a setting in IIS for allowing includes to parent paths, check that if the above doesn't work.
You can do it, using XMLHTTP and the VBscript Execute statement.
I wouldn't recommend it though as it creates substantial security risks.
A few links to get you started:
https://web.archive.org/web/20211020135215/https://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/042602-1.shtml
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/script56/html/vsstmexecute.asp
https://web.archive.org/web/20210927184623/http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/110100-1.shtml
It is a very high security risk, because someone can inject code into your app. Take your precautions.
One tip: the page you need to load from another server needs to have an extension different from .asp because if not the other server is going to send it already executed. It seems clear but I forgot it the first time!

What IIS 6.0 setting determines how a path is resolved?

I have a website that is deployed between 3 different environments - Dev, Stage, and Prod. For Stage and Prod, the site can resolve local paths to images with just the base url to the file, such as /SiteImages/banner.png. However, on the Dev server I have to hard code the full URL of the image path for the image to be resolved, such as http://server/folder/SiteImages/banner.png. Is there a setting I can flip to make the Dev server behave in the same manner as the other 2? I am using IIS 6.0 on a Win 2003 server.
There are usually three kinds of URIs that you can code in a website as far as I know.
Absolute: http://yoursite.com/somehing.jpg
This url includes the http:// and is
the full path to a resouce.
Root Relative:
/something/something.jpg
(In ASP.net
server-side only, you would use
'~/something/something.jpg')
This path is relative to the root of
your site.
File relative:
../something/something.jpg
This path
starts at the location of the file
that includes the URI. In this case,
it just back one directory (..) and
then goes back into the something
directory to look for something.jpg
What does the URL to the dev home page look like? Is it something like http://server/mydevsite/? If so, it sounds like you need to set up a virtual host.
Edit Just to clarify the above, say your prod and stage sites can be simply referenced as http://stagesite/ and http://prodsite/, if you use a path such as /images/myimage.jpg it assumes that the images folder are sitting in the root. In those two instances, no problem, images will display correctly. However, let's say your dev server is like the example I listed above. If your images are references as /images/myimage.jpg, instead of the server looking at http://server/mydevsite/images/myimage.jpg, it will instead look at http://server/images/myimage.jpg. If no images folder with the requested image exist in that server's root, you'll get an error.

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