We're building a CMS. The site will be built and managed by the users in aspx pages, but we would like to create a static site of HTML's.
The way we're doing it now is with code I found here that overloads the Render method in the Aspx Page and writes the HTML string to a file. This works fine for a single page, but the thing with our CMS is that we want to automatically create a few HTML pages for a site right from the start, even before the creator has edited anything in the system.
Does anyone know of any way to do this?
I seem to have found the solution for my problemby using the Server.Ecxcute method.
I found an article that demonstared the use of it:
TextWriter textWriter = new StringWriter();
Server.Execute("myOtherPage.aspx", textWriter);
Then I do a few maniulatons on the textWriter, and insert it into an html file. Et voila! It works!
Calling the Render method is still pretty simple. Just create an instance of your page, create a stub WebContext along with the WebRequest object, and call the Render method of the page. You are then free to do whatever you want with the results.
Alternatively, write a little curl or wget script to download and store whichever pages you want to make static.
You could use wget (a command line tool) to recursively query each page and save them to html files. It would update all necessary links in the resulting html to reference .html files instead of .aspx. This way, you can code all your site as if you were using server-generated pages (easier to test), and then convert it to static pages.
If you need static HTML for performance reasons only, my preference would be to use ASP.Net output caching.
I recommend you do this a very simple way and don't do it in code. It will allow your CMS code to do what the CMS code should do and will keep it as simple as possible.
Use a product such as HTTrack. It calls itself a "website copier". It crawls a site and creates html output. It is fast and free. You can just have it run at whatever frequency you think is best.
It decouples your HTML output needs from your CMS design and implementation. It reduces complexity and gives you some flexibility in how you output the HTML without introducing failure points in your CMS code.
#ckarras: I would rather not use an external tool, because I want the HTML pages to be created programmatically and not manually.
#jttraino: I don't have a time interval in which the site needs to be outputted- the uotput has to occur when a user creates a new site.
#Frank Krueger: I don't really understand how to create an instance of my page using WebContext and WebRequest.
I searched for "wget" in searchdotnet, and got to a post about a .net class called WebClient. It seems to do what I want if I use the DownloadString() method - gets a string from a specific url. The problem is that because our CMS needs to be logged in to, when the method tries to reach the page it's thrown to the login page, and therefore returns the login.aspx HTML...
Any thoughts as to how I can continue from here?
Related
I know there are lots of similar questions like this in the web, but I haven't got to one working solution after searching for these last 2 days. Some threads are outdated, others solutions don't work, others are too complicated to manage, so... Yes, another question about resources.axd files in asp.net projects.
I'm starting to build a set of server controls and embedding some resources. After building my controls and dragging them into pages, each individual resource is requested by the browser in the form of an .axd script. I understand the part where the ScriptManager manages these scripts and they're not ready to use, for instance, in Bundles in some sort of .Include("*.axd").
I tried some of the combine/minify/compress/gzip/icecreamOnTop packages out there but couldn't manage none of them to work.
I tried the StriptManager CompositeScript approach and the ScriptResources.axd are indeed combined, the response is successful (code 200), but in the end the scripts don't work. Example: I included the jQuery lib in that composite script and then tried to use it in the page - didn't work. I must say I didn't reference () the composite script anywhere because I didn't understand how to do it. If I set the path, then a 404 was returned (found the 1024 byte limit threads, etc...) and all the requests to the WebResources.axd would still remain.
I would prefer not to write an HttpHandler myself.
Also tried to download the AjaxToolkit and tried the ToolkitScriptManager which combines scripts, but that added ~4seconds to my page load. No, thanks.
My question is: what is the current approach regarding this matter in .net 4.5?
I will have lots of resources and would like to combine them. All js and css files in the final website project are bundled, but how to 'bundle' the axd files?
Here's a little example which will make the following requests:
Click here to view image
I know I can set the AjaxFrameworkMode to Disabled and will only have the 2 first WebResources.axd requests in this example, but what about when I have 10 css files embedded in my controls?
Any working solution would be much appreciated.
Many thanks
I managed to implement something that suits my case. More of a work around than a proper combining solution, but works and that's good enough for now.
All my controls extend a base class which has a property called ProcessResources. By default this property is set to true. That means that JS and CSS resources will be registered and each control has everything to work as standalone (axd resources will be generated). When set to false, no resource is registered and no axd files are generated.
The base class also has a static method that receives a destination path as a parameter and copies all the JS and CSS resources to that folder (if they don't exist or have been modified). This method returns a collection of all the needed resources for the control to work.
This way, on Application_Start, I can do something like:
myJsBundle.Inlude(ServerControlA.GetResources("~/ExternalResources", RESOURCES.JAVASCRIPT));
Then just need to set the ProcessResources flag to false (each control or web.config). All resources are now bundled and no axd files are generated.
Inside my _layout view I have added the following link , to refresh the current page as part my breadcrumb bar:
#(aoutput == "Index" ? "Home" : aoutput)
The above is working well on my development environment , but I am not sure If using the Request.Url.AbsoulteUri is the correct way to reference the current page URL ?
AbsoluteUri includes the scheme (such as http), the host, the port, the path, query string data and the fragment. As far as I know the fragment will not be included in the current URL because it is not sent with the request (that is, it's handled by the browser client-side).
This should be fine to use and is unlikely to cause you issues. Just be aware that query string data is included, which means that if you had a (poorly-designed) data manipulation system such as /Users/Index?action=deleteMostRecentUser then the user might accidently delete users because the URI would include the action.
Alternatives are
Absolute Path: /Home/Index
Path & Query: /Home/Index?query=keyword
You can use it as you mentioned.
Better way you make a separate partial view to implement breadcrumb.
And pass wanted model from Controller side. (Or in ViewBag)
The main benefit is you'll get is better control over Logic also flexible for future changes.
Hope helps.
I keep running into problems with URLs and routing.
Couldn't find an answer on SO.
I would like to manage all of my urls/links in a single place.
This is for my C# MVC code and the js/jquery ajax code.
These urls are scattered throughout my application.
Moving to a production server needs some fixes and I don't like the fact that I need to look for all of the occurrences in the application.
I don't mind fixing this once - but I would like to do it only once.
Any ideas how to manage all of these links/urls as a group will be very appreciated.
Be happy ad enjoy life, Julian
Consider using T4MVC
You could use Html.ActionLink or
Html.BuildUrlFromExpression(c => c.ControllerAction())
Depends, if you have application reading off certain urls and those urls changed once in a while. then you might want to consider putting all those urls into a database table/etc and retrieve them using specific key.
that way, when your url changed, all you need to do is to change the url on your database and all your application will still be running fine.
Urls should be managed in a single place: the RegisterRoutes static method in Global.asax. In absolutely every other part of your application you should use Html helpers when dealing/generating urls. This way you will never have problems because helpers take into account your routing system.
So instead of writing:
$('#foo').click(function() {
$('#result').load('/mycontroller/myaction');
return false;
});
you use an HTML helper to generate this foo:
<%: Html.Action("foo", "myaction", "mycontroller") %>
and then:
$('#foo').click(function() {
$('#result').load(this.href);
return false;
});
Never hardcode a single url in your application except of course in global.asax which is the only centralized place urls should be defined. So basically every time you find yourself writing something of the form /foo/bar in some other part than global.asax you are doing it wrong.
Is there a simple way of making the static content of an .aspx page multi-lingual? Resource files are nice for controls but it's quite hard and annoying to write big chunks of html in them. Any easier ways?
Make properties in resources files and use them, .NET automatically finds the correct resource file, also just make sure so that the property name is same in all the resource files, so it will replace the property value in .aspx page with the value in the resource file.
Don't code html markup in resource file, have the html markup in the .aspx page itself, just get the essential values from resource files.
Just to reiterate what Mahesh said: do NOT put markup in the resource files, just put the static content into them.
If you need to serve different views based on culture, consider doing something else. For example, if you're using MVC you could write a view engine that return the correct markup for each culture.
#ciscoheat what you say is correct, LOCALIZE control is the right thing to use for big chunk of data.
I have a lot of html pages, but I don't know how to display them through the asp.net mvc view.
I buid a view as my template and use asp.net mvc to insert html into the template and then render it.
But the question is that I must use FileStream to read the raw html-based files into memroy and then put it into view template, like ViewData["content"] = ???.
I just want to know if there are some other better ways to render static html files to the browser.
Did i describe the question clearly?
I guess you could do something like this:
using(var file = new StreamReader(htmlFileName))
{
return Content(file.ReadToEnd());
}
Note that the mime type automatically defaults to text/html, but you could optionally specify which mime type headers should be sent by supplying the type as an additional argument to the Content method.
I guess you also can point a iframe element from HTML to the target file url directly.
Alternatively you could write your own ActionResult that writes the contents of the file to Response.Output (could potentially avoid loading the entire file into memory at once albeit it might not be a big issue).