25 August 2009

Yet another way to determine root paths in ASP.NET

How many times I have tried to find the root path of an ASP.NET page or a handler (ASHX) in order to call another URL I can hardly count. When working with WMS and WFS services and connected documents - when you call all kind of weird 'services' - it's something that needs to be done often. I decided to put a few in what seems to become my trade mark - extension methods. I created the following extensions to HttpContext
using System;
using System.Web;

namespace LocalJoost.Utilities.Web
{
  public static class HttpContextExtensions
  {
    public static string FullRootPath( this HttpContext context )
    {
      return context.Request.Url.AbsoluteUri.Split(
        new[] { context.Request.Url.AbsolutePath },
        StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries)[0];
    }

    public static string FullApplicationPath(this HttpContext context)
    {
      return string.Concat(context.FullRootPath(), 
        context.Request.ApplicationPath);
    }
  }
}
In the Page_Load of an aspx page you can, for instance, use the methods as described below:
var r = Context.FullRootPath();
var a = Context.FullApplicationPath();
r will contain something like "http://localhost:3974" and a "http://localhost:3974/YourTestSite". Maybe there are simpler ways, but these work very well for me.

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