Cannot use a leading ../ to exit above the top directory

Question

What this means is that your web page is referring to content which is in the folder one level up from your page, but your page is already in the website's root folder, so the relative path is invalid. Judging by your exception message it looks like an image control is causing the problem.

You must have something like:

<asp:Image ImageUrl="..\foo.jpg" />

But since the page itself is in the root folder of the website, it cannot refer to content one level up, which is what the leading ..\ is doing.

You can use ~/img/myImage.png instead of ../img/myImage.png to avoid this error in ASP.NET pages.

You have an image or a favicon link of the style ="../" somewhere, that if the "../" were valid, would go beyond the top of the site, like this:

Image:

http://example.com/Images/test.jpg

Page

http://example.com/Pages/test.aspx

Valid on that page: ../Images/test.jpg
Would throw an error: ../../Images/test.jpg

It means that one of the paths has a ".." at the beginning of it that would result in exiting the web site's root folder hierarchy. You need to google "asp.net relative paths" or something like that to help you with your problem.

BTW, a hint to where the problem is is included in the exception page that you saw. It will actually tell you what file it found the problem in.

To head off future occurences of this exception, do a search in the entire solution for this string: "../". If you find any of those in files in the root path of your web site, address them.

In my case it turned out to be commented out HTML in a master page!

Who knew that commented out HTML such as this were actually interpreted by ASP.NET!

<!--
<link rel="icon" href="../../favicon.ico">
-->