code.commongroove.com » ASP.Net

ASP.Net: App_Offline.htm as a Maintenance Page

Greg — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 15:40:35 +0000

While Googling about, I came upon an oldy-but-goody, that apparently has been available since the release of ASP.Net 2.0: App_Offline.htm.

An undocumented feature, you can copy a file called app_offline.htm into the root of your .Net website and the application will “bleed off” existing connections and redirect all new requests to the app_offline.htm page.

Once you remove the file, requests will again go back to your site.

Here’s ScottGu’s posts about it from back in 2005:

One thing to note if you are using ASP.Net MVC. Be sure your system.webserver configuration is set up to handle all requests so you don’t get 404s instead of the app_offline.htm page:

>
runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
>

ASP.Net MVC: Partially Secured Sites / Switching from HTTPS back to HTTP

Greg — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:47:20 +0000

Most sites out there have some portions that should be only served via HTTPS, while the remainder can be HTTP, such as account pages and content pages respectively. This is sometimes called a “partially secured site.”

Starting with MVC 2, you could decorate controllers and actions with the RequireHttps attribute, which would redirect non-secure GET requests to HTTPS. Unfortunately, once you are in HTTPS, you won’t automatically switch back to HTTP for those actions that do not require it.

To do that, you can override OnActionExecuting in your base controller (to save you from having to reimplement the call in each of your actual controllers) and redirect the user.

Here’s the code

[RequireHttps]
public ActionResult MySslAction()
{
// HTTPS
}

public ActionResult MyNonSslAction()
{
// HTTP
}

protected override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext)
{
if (filterContext.HttpContext.Request.IsSecureConnection && !filterContext.ActionDescriptor.IsDefined(typeof(RequireHttpsAttribute), true))
{
// redirect to un-secured page
string url = "http://" + filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.Host + filterContext.HttpContext.Request.RawUrl;
filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Redirect(url);
}

base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext);
}

C#: String Extension to Replace Accented Characters

Greg — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 13:47:39 +0000

Have you ever wanted to replace “accented” characters in a string with their equivalent English character? Here’s a string extension that replaces these diacritics within a string for C# 2.0 and up:

public static string ReplaceDiacritics(this string source)
{
string sourceInFormD = source.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD);

var output = new StringBuilder();
foreach (char c in sourceInFormD)
{
UnicodeCategory uc = CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(c);
if (uc != UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark)
output.Append(c);
}

return (output.ToString().Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormC));
}

The extension replaces characters like “ö” with “o”, “è″ with “e” and “ñ” with “n”. This is great for getting acceptable URLs or for auto-complete / type-ahead search boxes where you want to match on both the accented and non-accented characters.

JavaScript, UTF-8 Encoding: escape() vs. encodeURIComponent()

Greg — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 23:07:00 +0000

ASP.Net web applications default to UTF-8 encoding. Now, if you are using JavaScript to create or change URLs, you might run into an issue with the way the function “escape()” encodes characters if you are handling the decoding in your code behind via Request.QueryString.

To avoid ending up with “unkown” characters in your resultant string, use the JavaScript function “encodeURIComponent()” instead. This should correctly encode your URLs for UTF-8.

Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException in FireFox with MSFT Ajax

Greg — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 02:18:10 +0000

If you encounter this error while navigating away from an AJAX-enabled page with a non-IE browser, you can silence it with the following JavaScript:

if (!document.all) //non-ie
{
window.onbeforeunload = function() {
Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManager.getInstance().add_endRequest(ignoreOnEndRequest);
}
}

function ignoreOnEndRequest(sender, e) {
err = e.get_error();
if (err) {
if (err.name == "Sys.WebForms.PageRequestManagerServerErrorException") {
e.set_errorHandled(true);
}
}
}

Hope it works for you!