ASP.NET Web Pages - Folders

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This chapter introduces knowledge about folders and folder paths.

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In this chapter, you will learn:

• Logical folder structure and physical folder structure

• Virtual name and physical name

• Web URL and Web path

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##Logical folder structure

The following is Typical ASP.NET website folder structure:

• "Account" folder contains login and security files

• "App_Data" Folder contains database and data files

• "Images" folder contains pictures

• "Scripts" folder contains browser scripts

• The "Shared" folder contains common files (such as layout and style files)

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Physical folder structure

The physical folder structure of the "Images" folder in the above website on your computer may be as follows:

C:\Documents\MyWebSites\Demo\Images

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Virtual Name and physical name

Take the example above:

The virtual name of the website image may be "Images/pic31.jpg".

The corresponding physical name is "C:\Documents\MyWebSites\Demo\Images\pic31.jpg".

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URL and path

URL is used to access files in the website: http://www.w3cschool.cc/html/html-tutorial.html

URL corresponds to the physical file on the server: C:\MyWebSites\w3cschool\html\html-tutorial.html

The virtual path is an abbreviation of the physical path. If you use virtual paths, you do not need to update the paths when you change domain names or move your web pages to other servers.

URLhttp://www.w3cschool.cc/html/html-tutorial.htmlServer namew3cschoolVirtual path/html/html-tutorial.html Physical pathC:\MyWebSites\w3cschool\html\html-tutorial.html

The root directory of the disk drive is written as C:, but the root directory of the website is / (slash).

The virtual path of the Web folder is usually different from the physical folder.

In your code, decide to use physical paths and virtual paths based on your coding needs.

ASP.NET folder paths have 3 tools: ~ operator, Server.MapPath method and Href method.

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~ Operator

Use the ~ operator to specify virtual paths in programming code.

If you use the ~ operator, you can move your site to a different folder or location without changing any of your code:

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Server.MapPath method

Server.MapPath method Convert the virtual path (/) to a physical path that the server understands (C:\Documents\MyWebSites\Demo\default.html).

When you need to open a data file on the server, you can use this method (the data file can only be accessed by providing the complete physical path):

In the next chapter of this tutorial, you will learn more about reading Knowledge of fetching (and writing) data files on the server.

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Href method

The Href method converts the path used in the code into a path that the browser can understand (the browser does not understand the ~ operator).

You can use the Href method to create paths to resources (such as image files and CSS files).

This method is generally used in the <a>, <img> and <link> elements in HTML:

The Href method is a method of the WebPage object.