Is there a benefit to using @Url.Content("~")
I'm new to MVC4/razor2, and I think understand the general benefit of using @Url.Content and @Url.Action- if my routing or virtual directory changes, magic-url-strings are correctly rendered.
I'm looking at some legacy Javascript-with-razor code in a view that is peppered with '@Url.Content("~")'. This renders out as '/' - or, website root. Which.... would always be the case, no?
Or is there some situation in which this could be rendered differently?
Note: it is not ~/ - just plain ol' tilde.
I'm planning on extracting the razor calls to helper-functions, and moving main block of JavaScript into an external file (for linting and general "cleanliness"). I don't need to "fix" anything that currently happening, but I would like to understand it better.
Answer
Url.Content maps the tilde to the application root. The application root is not the same thing as the website root.
From this article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.virtualpathutility(v=vs.110).aspx:
An absolute virtual path starts with the literal slash mark (/). A relative virtual path is relative to the application root directory, if it is just a tilde (~) or starts with the tilde and a double backslash (~\) or the tilde and a slash mark (~/). Making a virtual path relative makes the path independent of the application.
As of MVC4 Url.Content is not needed to convert the tilde to the applicaiton root: http://beletsky.net/2012/04/new-in-aspnet-mvc4-razor-changes.html