ASP.NET MVC Url display problem

Question

I have recently been experimenting with the profile features of ASP.NET. I am having trouble getting a "website" property to display correctly. For example, if the website I enter is:

facebook.com/contactalig

and I render it using

<a href="<%: Profile.Website %>"><%: Profile.Website %></a>

it gets rendered on screen as

http://localhost:51225/users/facebook.com/contactalig

Initially, I thought I might just prepend "http://" if it didn't contain one, but I feel there should be a cleaner solution.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Without the protocol etc it isn't an absolute uri, so the browser (correctly) treats it as relative to the current URL.

So yes: check for a protocol. Perhaps just StartsWith is enough here, else a regex or maybe Uri.TryCreate (or whatever it is) specifying absolute-only.

Personally I would do this check at the point of data-entry, not at display.