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File this under "Damn, I should have known that" -- CSS and Relative Paths
By Andrew Pollack on 03/18/2010 at 07:33 AM EDTI was whining about a feature being missing in Designer 8.5.x yesterday in a closed forum for "Design Partners" when I learned something I wished I'd known a long time ago. I'm writing this to share it with you, so you can be saved the work I've been doing.
The feature I wanted (and still want) is for file resources that use the new editors (e.g. CSS, HTML, JAVASCRIPT) to allow "<computed text>" values or at least some form of tokenization to allow you to include things like "@webdbname" and profile document values in your CSS or Javascript files Without such a feature I've had to create "page" elements instead without the snazzy editors.
I was describing the problem in context of CSS pages and paths to image resources stored in the same database, when Nathan made a comment that it just seems to work fine for him. So, of course first I declared that I was more than 99% sure that was impossible, but then (giving the man his due) I decided to research it. Of course, I learned something I should have known.
If you look at the CSS Spec ( http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS1/ ) section 6.4 clearly states
Partial URLs are interpreted relative to the source of the style sheet, not relative to the document:..
So, what that means in a Domino database is that if you have a file resource, it is always accessed relative to the top of the NSF (e.g. ../../mydatabase.nsf/myImage.jpg ) and your CSS file is the same (e.g. ../../mydatabase.nsf/mystyle.css ). Even if the document you're loading the css from is in a different database, or in a view or document buried down somewhere inside that database, as long as the images referenced in the css URL() statements are in the same database as the CSS file itself, they'll be seen and loaded correctly without having to specify the full path to the images.
In other words, if you have mystyle.css as a file resource in mydatabase.nsf, and it contains this statement:
div.myFancyDiv { background-image:url(mybackground.jpg) ; }
It will work even if you are calling to /mydatabase.nsf/mystyle.css from another database, another server, a view nested deeper in the same database, or anywhere else.
When I think of how many wasted hours I've spent.....ugh.
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