Blog

Posts written in January 2019.

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    Dealing With Broken Images In ASP.NET

    Regardless of any site you have worked on, there is always a potential problem of a page rendering broken images. This is more likely to happen when images are served from external sources or through accidental deletion within content management platforms.

    The only way I found a way to deal with this issue, is to provide a fallback alternative if the image to be served cannot be found. I've created a FallbackImage() extension method that can be applied to any string variable that contains a path to an image.

    public static class ImageExtensions
    {
        /// <summary>
        /// Creates a fallback image if the image requested does not exist.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="imageUrl"></param>
        /// <returns></returns>
        public static string FallbackImage(this string imageUrl)
        {
            string cachedImagePath = CacheEngine.Get<string>(imageUrl);
    
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(cachedImagePath))
            {
                string sanitiseImageUrl = string.Empty;
    
                if (!imageUrl.IsExternalLink())
                    sanitiseImageUrl = $"{HttpContext.Current.GetCurrentDomain()}{imageUrl.Replace("~", string.Empty)}";
    
                // Attempt to request the image.
                WebRequest request = WebRequest.Create(sanitiseImageUrl);
    
                try
                {
                    WebResponse response = request.GetResponse();
                    cachedImagePath = imageUrl;
                }
                catch (Exception ex)
                {
                    cachedImagePath = "/resources/images/placeholder.jpg";
                }
    
                // Add image path to cache.
                CacheEngine.Add(cachedImagePath, imageUrl, 5);
            }
    
            return cachedImagePath;
        }
    }
    

    To ensure optimum performance to minimise any unnecessary checks for the same image, the request is stored in cache for 5 minutes.

    The method is using some functionality that I have developed within my own website, which will only work when referenced in your own codebase:

    • GetCurrentDomain - get the full URL of the current domain including any protocols and ports.
    • CacheEngine - provides a bunch of helper methods to interact with .NET cache provider easily.