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.
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 Solution
The sole purpose of JavaScriptResult is to set the ContentType to application/x-javascript.
You might want to use this if you have an action which returns a .JS file to the browser. For example, you could write an action which concatenates all of your JavaScript files together, so that you could return them in one request instead of many. You might also want to generate JavaScript from a template.
I have seen some blog posts implying that JavaScriptResult will cause the returned file to be executed within the context of the current page. This impression apparently comes from the release notes. But I can't see any mechanism by which that would actually happen in the source code. In other words, in order to get this behavior, you would have to write code within the page causing it to happen. Simply using JavaScriptResult will not have this effect. As far as I can tell, it is simply serving up a js file.