Can I create a Controller that simply returns an image asset?
I would like to route this logic through a controller, whenever a URL such as the following is requested:
www.mywebsite.com/resource/image/topbanner
The controller will look up topbanner.png
and send that image directly back to the client.
I've seen examples of this where you have to create a View - I don't want to use a View. I want to do it all with just the Controller.
Is this possible?
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:
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.