My goal is to share images, css, js, etc. across multiple websites that are all hosted under the same parent virtual directory in IIS. Of course, I could hard code the images paths, but I'd hoped .NET had a method that could intelligently resolve URLs using the IIS configuration.
Here is my file/virtual directory structure:
Parent Site (Virtual Directory) default.aspx mypage.aspx otherpage.aspx images - logo.jpg css - site.css Subsite1 (Virtual Directory) - default.aspx - products.aspx Subsite2 (Virtual Directory) - default.aspx - products.aspx - miscellaneous.aspx
Parent Site, Subsite1, and Subsite2 are all virtual directories set up for http://parentsite.com, http://subsite1.com, and http://subsite2.com, respectively. I want to share images, js, css, etc. across these sites.
Is there a method in .NET that will resolve ~/images/logo.jpg as http://parentsite.com/images/logo.jpg when called from one of the subsites (e.g., http://subsite.com/default.aspx)?
In IIS6 and even IIS7 you can use a new virtual directory, call it "assets", in all of the children sites.
Updated site layout:
Parent Site (Virtual Directory)
default.aspx
mypage.aspx
otherpage.aspx
assets
-images
- logo.jpg
-css
- site.css
Subsite1 (Virtual Directory)
- default.aspx
- products.aspx
assets (Virtual Directory to parent assets)
Subsite2 (Virtual Directory)
- default.aspx
- products.aspx
- miscellaneous.aspx
assets (Virtual Directory to parent assets)
With this structure you can share the same "assets" folder with all sites and still access it as "~/assets". This allows you to use the assets with any of the domains that IIS is answering for.
A CDN is a good option but often times you would create seperate DNS enteries for each site like http://cdn.parentsite.com and http://cdn.childsite.com and then create some function to reference the files as http://cdn.(currentdomain).
In my opinion, using an absolute or relative path to the shared assets folder will make life easier for you.