Change output folder in debug mode?

[Samuel Milton]

Is it possible to change the output folder when site is in debug mode?

When debugging is turned off my combined JS/CSS-files are put in a release folder with .Render("/release/main.css"), but when in debug mode I haven't found a way to do this.

I want something like .RenderDebug("/dev/main.css")

Is this possible?

[Alex Ullrich]

What is your use case for this?  I don't really see enough value in this to include it in the core library but am open to convincing.

To implement on your own, I think extension methods off the bundle classes would be your best bet.  Something like:

public static string CustomRender(this CSSBundle bundle, string outputFile) {
    string location = DebugCheck() ? (_debugPrefix + outputFile) : (_productionPrefix + outputFile);
    return bundle.Render(location);
}

You would have to define rules to dictate how paths should actually be combined and how to tell if you are debugging or not.

Hope this helps,

Alex

[Samuel Milton]

Thanks for your input Alex!

When thinking about it just now i have two arguments.

1) SquishIt generated files are mixed with my source CSS/LESS-files. In our project, a quite large e-commerce site in over 50 languages, we have about 35 LESS-files in out /ui/css-folder. As I like to keep my CSS modular. A majority of these files are bundled in to a single "main.css". But, I also create separate bundles for sections the visitors not always is going to, eg "My profile", "Check out"-process and so on. Each of these extra bundles also creates a generated *.css file in my /ui/css/ folder where they are mixed with my "original" CSS files. When I go to release mode I render all bundles to /ui/release/css/ and it would be nice to render my debug files to /ui/dev/css/ to keep them separated from my source files.

2) More foolproof development/testing. Lets say you specify a path to a background image in your /ui/css/header.css file. The image is in the /ui/img/ folder, so you specify the path by doing background-image: url(../img/header.png). This will work when in development mode. But when you go to release this will fail since the CSS-file now is in the /ui/release/css/ folder and the browser will look for the background image in the /ui/release/img/ folder. By being able to specify a development output folder I think these types of bugs could be easier to spot.

Other than these two above I think that all the arguments for having the possibility to render the production code to a separate folder would also apply for doing the same to development code.

Best regards, Samuel

[Samuel Milton]

3) It's easier to ignore an entire folder (eg /ui/dev/*) in the CVS than individual files (eg /ui/css/shoppingcart.less.squishit.debug.css, /ui/css/checkout.less.squishit.debug.css) in a folder where they are mixed with my source files.

[K. Adam White]

I can see your reasoning for this, but I'd like to propose an alternative (if parallel) methodology: What if the debug files were rendered to the release directory? That way the .debug.css files would be at the same level as the final release-mode ones, and you could exclude just that entire directory within your VCS. I'm operating on the assumption that since SquishIt generates files on-demand on the server, technically you don't have any reason to store the compiled styles in source control; obviously this wouldn't work if you have a need to version-control the release-mode files.

(As an aside, at least with Git it's easy to ignore *.debug.css files by extension -- does your VCS not permit exclusion by partial file name match?)

K. Adam White
kadam...@gmail.com
401.575.7829

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:17 AM, Samuel Milton <samuel....@gmail.com> wrote:

3) It's easier to ignore an entire folder (eg /ui/dev/*) in the CVS than individual files (eg /ui/css/shoppingcart.less.squishit.debug.css, /ui/css/checkout.less.squishit.debug.css) in a folder where they are mixed with my source files.

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[Samuel Milton]

"What if the debug files were rendered to the release directory?"

That would be very good. If you can control it yourself, like with a .DebugToReleaseFolder() or something :)