Asp.net-mvc – Serving favicon.ico in ASP.NET MVC

asp.netasp.net-mvcfaviconrazor

What is the final/best recommendation for how to serve favicon.ico in ASP.NET MVC?

I am currently doing the following:

Adding an entry to the very beginning of my RegisterRoutes method:
```
routes.IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico");
```
Placing favicon.ico in the root of my application (which is also going to be the root of my domain).

I have two questions:

Is there no way to put the favicon.ico somewhere other than the root of my application. It's pretty icky being right there at the same level as Content and Controllers.
Is this IgnoreRoute("favicon.ico") statement sufficient – or should I also do the following as discussed in a blog post from Phil Haack. I'm not aware of ever having seen a request to favicon.ico in any directory other than the root – which would make this unnecessary (but it's good to know how to do it).
```
routes.IgnoreRoute("{*favicon}", new {favicon=@"(.*/)?favicon.ico(/.*)?"});
```

Best Answer

I agree with the answer from Chris, but seeing this is a specific ASP.NET MVC question it would be better to use either Razor syntax:

<link rel="icon" href="@Url.Content("~/content/favicon.ico")"/>

Or traditionally

<link rel="icon" href="<%= Url.Content("~/content/favicon.ico") %>"/>

rather than

<link rel="icon" href="http://www.mydomain.com/content/favicon.ico"/>

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Can an ASP.NET MVC controller return an Image

Use the base controllers File method.

public ActionResult Image(string id)
{
    var dir = Server.MapPath("/Images");
    var path = Path.Combine(dir, id + ".jpg"); //validate the path for security or use other means to generate the path.
    return base.File(path, "image/jpeg");
}

As a note, this seems to be fairly efficient. I did a test where I requested the image through the controller (http://localhost/MyController/Image/MyImage) and through the direct URL (http://localhost/Images/MyImage.jpg) and the results were:

MVC: 7.6 milliseconds per photo
Direct: 6.7 milliseconds per photo

Note: this is the average time of a request. The average was calculated by making thousands of requests on the local machine, so the totals should not include network latency or bandwidth issues.

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

From the readme word doc for RC1 (not indexed by google)

ASP.NET Compiler Post-Build Step

Currently, errors within a view file are not detected until run time. To let you detect these errors at compile time, ASP.NET MVC projects now include an MvcBuildViews property, which is disabled by default. To enable this property, open the project file and set the MvcBuildViews property to true, as shown in the following example:

<Project ToolsVersion="3.5" DefaultTargets="Build" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003">
  <PropertyGroup>
    <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
  </PropertyGroup>

Note Enabling this feature adds some overhead to the build time.

You can update projects that were created with previous releases of MVC to include build-time validation of views by performing the following steps:

Open the project file in a text editor.
Add the following element under the top-most <PropertyGroup> element: <MvcBuildViews>true</MvcBuildViews>
At the end of the project file, uncomment the <Target Name="AfterBuild"> element and modify it to match the following:

<Target Name="AfterBuild" Condition="'$(MvcBuildViews)'=='true'">
    <AspNetCompiler VirtualPath="temp" PhysicalPath="$(ProjectDir)\..\$(ProjectName)" />
</Target>

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Asp.net-mvc – Can an ASP.NET MVC controller return an Image

Asp.net-mvc – Compile Views in ASP.NET MVC

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