Could not find a part of the path 'C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\~\TextFiles\ActiveUsers.txt'

Question

I tried many ways to access a text file in my Visual Studio 2012 Solution from a folder named TextFiles

using (System.IO.StreamWriter file = new System.IO.StreamWriter(@"~/TextFiles/ActiveUsers.txt", true))
{
    file.WriteLine(model.UserName.ToString());
}

But it kept on throwing the error

Could not find a part of the path 'C:\Program Files (x86)\IIS Express\~\TextFiles\ActiveUsers.txt'.

Not sure where I made a mistake

Answer 1

You need to use HttpServerUtility.MapPath which will turn the ~/ portion of the path in to the real location it resildes on your hard drive.

So that would change your code to (assuming you are in one of the IIS classes that expose a Server property to it's methods)

var path = Server.MapPath(@"~/TextFiles/ActiveUsers.txt");

using (System.IO.StreamWriter file = new System.IO.StreamWriter(path, true))
{
    file.WriteLine(model.UserName.ToString());
}

Answer 2

I ran into a similar issue and ended up using

string sFileName = HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(@"~/dirname/readme.txt");