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C# get current directory without having to specify full path? [duplicate]

We have a web application written in ASP.NET 3.5. In it, we access a file in the code-behind. (Ordinary C# file access, done on the server during the page life-cycle, this has nothing to do with URLs or web browsers).
On our production systems, we specify the full path to the file in question in the web.config. We'd like to be able to include a local copy of the file in the project in version control, and then to use a relative path in the version-controlled web.config to point to it, so that a checked-out copy of the application could be run from within Visual Studio's debugger without having to do any configuration.
The problem is that when the web application is running in debug mode, its working directory is neither the project nor the solution directory. In a windows or console application, in a project's properties page I can set the working directory. But in a web application I cannot.
Any ideas on how I can manage to make this work?

To get the path of the root of the application:
//equivalent to Server.MapPath("/"); if at domain root, e.g Http://mysite.com/
string path = Server.MapPath("~");
This answer gives a rundown of a few different common Server.MapPath() uses that may also be of use to you.

In code behind: HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath("~")

Use:
Server.MapPath("~");

Why does my file directory include '/bin'?

I'm trying to find a file in a settings folder in my application. I have a xml file there. When I run the following code:
XDocument xDoc = XDocument.Load(#"..\settings\Settings.xml");
I get the DirectoryNotFoundException and the exception says not found at \bin\settings\Settings.xml'., instead of above. I even tried the full root directory to see the issue, C://... but it still includes a bin folder?
How can I have it so it doesn't include the bin part?

By default, the build results in Visual Studio are saved in a folder like bin\Debug. Since you use a relative path that jumps one folder higher, you get yourProjectFolder\bin\settings\Settings.xml. That file doesn't exist, since it's presumably in the project folder, not the bin folder.
The typical way to deal with this is to make sure the files that are supposed to be a part of the content actually have Build Action set to Content.
Using a rooted path definitely works - most likely, you made a mistake somewhere; either the path isn't rooted at all, or you're doing something like interpreting the path as an URI rather than a file path. XDocument.Load takes a URI, not a file path - the proper way to reference an absolute path on the filesystem would be file://C:/ThePath/Settings/Settings.xml.

Get resources folder path c#

Some resources I have in my project are fine and working Ok using string paths but what if I move the project to another directory or to another computer, it will stop working.
Please I need to get the path of the resources folder of my project in a string variable,
Something like this
C:\Users\User1\Documents\<projects folder>\<project name>\Resources\
Thanks in advance.

If you know the path relative to where the app is running, you can do something like this.
First, get the app's running path:
string RunningPath = AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory;
Then, get navigate to the relative path using something like this:
string FileName = string.Format("{0}Resources\\file.txt", Path.GetFullPath(Path.Combine(RunningPath, #"..\..\")));
In this example I my "Resources" folder is located two directories up from my running one.
I should also mention, that if your resource is included in the project, you should be able to get it using:
System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetManifestResourceNames();
this will return an array of your resources.

If the files are stored in your project folder, you can retrieve the files using
System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory.
This statement retrieves the path as to where your application is installed.
Click Here to get a detailed explanation on this.

This might not be the cleanest way, but it has been useful to me.
If you had a structure like:
C:\...\MyApp\app.exe
C:\...\MyApp\ConfigFiles\MyConfig.xml
The code will return a path relative to the running assembly.
GetPath("ConfigFiles/MyConfig.xml") // returns the full path to MyConfig.xml
private string GetPath(string relativePath)
{
var appPath = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location;
string pattern = #"^(.+\\)(.+exe)$";
Regex regex = new Regex(pattern, RegexOptions.None);
var match = regex.Match(appPath);
return System.IO.Path.GetFullPath(match.Groups[1].Value + relativePath);
}

You could try to use |DataDirectory| documented here.
Here's a description of how it works from an old Microsoft article
One of the reasons why it was hard to work with database files before
is that the full path to the database was serialized in different
places. This made it harder to share a project and also to deploy the
application. In this version, the .NET runtime added support for what
we call the DataDirectory macro. This allows Visual Studio to put a
special variable in the connection string that will be expanded at
run-time. So instead of having a connection string like this:
"Data Source=.\SQLExpress;AttachDbFileName=c:\program files\app\data.mdf"
You can have a connection string like this:
"Data Source=.\SQLExpress;AttachDbFileName=|DataDirectory|\data.mdf"
This connection string syntax is supported by the SqlClient and OleDb
managed providers.
By default, the |DataDirectory| variable will be expanded as follow:
- For applications placed in a directory on the user machine, this will be the app's (.exe) folder.
- For apps running under ClickOnce, this will be a special data folder created by ClickOnce
- For Web apps, this will be the App_Data folder

Getting directory based the location of file C#

I'm trying to write a relative path from a file but the only relative paths I can get are from the running app file.
This is causing problems as NCrunch runs its test from a different directory so its failing all my tests because it cant find the files which are relative to my code file.
It's important that this be a relative path as there are several people working on this project so absolute paths don't work.
Is there any way to make the path relative to the .cs file where the code is written?
until now I've been using
private static readonly string MyDocumentsRoot = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.MyDocuments);
public static readonly string ApplicationRoot = MyDocumentsRoot + #"\Visual Studio 2012\Projects\";
but really need it to be a little more relative

The solution is well documented in NCRUNCH documentation:
Implicit File Dependencies
The other solutions, sooner or later, will fail. (I had similar trouble with MSTest, which offers a similar solution).

You can try with this code - based on GetExecutingAssembly method
string path = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location;
string directory= Path.GetDirectoryName( path );
Or
string path = System.Reflection.Assembly.GetAssembly(YourClass).Location;

The documentation shows the paths are relative to the project file:
For example, you could specify the following files to include:
SpecialConfiguration\ImportantConfigFile.config
..\CustomBuild\**.*
..\..\TestResources\Spreadsheets\*.xls
This would include an individual file (ImportantConfigFile.config), the entire contents of the ..\CustomBuild directory, all of its subdirectories, and all .xls files within the ..\..\TestResources\Spreadsheets directory.
All file paths must be specified relative to the project file's path on disk. When NCrunch builds a workspace, it will automatically arrange all dependent files so they exist with the same relative paths in their workspace as they did in their original location.

You can use str=Directory.getdirectory which will give you the path of the app (the folders up until Release or Debug (where your app is located) and save it in a string (the method returns a string). After doing that you can use the str.replace(str1,str2) method which locates str1 and replaces it with str2. Just don't forget that \ inside a string is \\ because \ is an escape character. If you need help with escape characters let me know so I can help you with that as well.

I usually place an old style ini-file where my executable resides. Here I store the absolute paths of files and folders required by the application. This also enables me to configure these pathes differently in a production enivronment (on the cutomers site) than on my development environment. Having just a copy of this ini-file in the folder from where NCrunch runs the assemlies would solve the problem.
My ini-file implementation searches all the folders, starting at the folder where the executable resides, towards the root folder, until it finds the ini-file. This enables me to have different executables using a common ini-file. E.g. if a place the ini-file in the bin folder both, the Debug and the Release version will automatically access the same ini-file.

File path for project files?

I am working on a media player in C# but when I want to make my test I have a problem.
I have to create a new object song with the following path:
#"C:\Users\Jesus Antonio\Desktop\JukeboxV2.0\JukeboxV2.0\Datos\ich will.mp3"
It works but when I change the computer I have to rewrite the entire path,
My project is called JukeboxV2.0
In java I remember you can just write the path for example
#"JukeboxV2.0\JukeboxV2.0\Datos\ich will.mp3"
This will save a lot of time because I can take my project to different computers and it works, but here I don't known how to do that, anyone know?

You would do something like this to get the path "Data\ich_will.mp3" inside your application environments folder.
string fileName = "ich_will.mp3";
string path = Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, #"Data\", fileName);
In my case it would return the following:
C:\MyProjects\Music\MusicApp\bin\Debug\Data\ich_will.mp3
I use Path.Combine and Environment.CurrentDirectory in my example. These are very useful and allows you to build a path based on the current location of your application. Path.Combine combines two or more strings to create a location, and Environment.CurrentDirectory provides you with the working directory of your application.
The working directory is not necessarily the same path as where your executable is located, but in most cases it should be, unless specified otherwise.

Path.Combine(AppDomain.CurrentDomain.BaseDirectory, #"JukeboxV2.0\JukeboxV2.0\Datos\ich will.mp3")
base directory + your filename

I was facing a similar issue, I had a file on my project, and wanted to test a class which had to deal with loading files from the FS and process them some way. What I did was:
added the file test.txt to my test project
on the solution explorer hit alt-enter (file properties)
there I set BuildAction to Content and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer, I guess Copy always would have done it as well
then on my tests I just had to Path.Combine(Environment.CurrentDirectory, "test.txt") and that's it. Whenever the project is compiled it will copy the file (and all it's parent path, in case it was in, say, a folder) to the bin\Debug (or whatever configuration you are using) folder.
Hopes this helps someone