CSS Background-Image refuses to display in ASP.Net MVC

Question

I am having trouble displaying an background image in my ASP.NET MVC 2 application. Currently, In ~/Views/Shared/Site.master, I set my link to the style sheet to:

<link href="<%:@Url.Content("~/Content/Site.css") %>" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

The image I plan to display is in my ~/Content/Images/Designs.png

Here is what I have tried

body
{
    background-image: url(~/Content/Images/designs.png); 
    background-repeat: repeat;  
    font-size: .75em;
    font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    color: #696969;
}

Other Tries Included:

background-image: url(./Content/Images/designs.png); 
background-image: url(Content/Images/designs.png); 
background-image: url(Images/designs.png); 

none of the above tries worked. What can I do?

Answer 1

The url inside a CSS file is relative to the location of the CSS file.

So if we suppose that you have ~/content/foo.css and you want to include ~/images/foo.png here's how to reference it inside foo.css:

background-image: url(../images/foo.png); 

Don't use any ~ inside a CSS file. It has no meaning.

So in your case if the CSS file is ~/Content/Site.css and you want to reference ~/Content/Images/Designs.png the correct syntax is:

background-image: url(images/designs.png); 

If this doesn't work for you there might be different causes:

• The image doesn't exist at that location
• You didn't specify width and height to the containing element so you don't see the image

What I would recommend you is to use FireBug and inspect the corresopnding DOM element to see exactly what styles and images are applied to it.

Answer 2

This is what I had to do:

background-image: url('@Url.Content("~/images/foo.png")')

Answer 3

If you use bundles and have the directory structure like :

-Content
--lightbox
---css
----lightbox.css
---imgages
----close.png

then you can make a separate bundle for content in subdirectories by defining the bundle in that subdirectory:

bundles.Add(new StyleBundle("~/Content/lightbox/css/bundle")
                .Include("~/Content/lightbox/css/lightbox.css"));


background-image: url(../images/close.png); 

Answer 4

In my case I had to back out to the root and include a path to the Content directory.

So even if my directory structure looked like:

-Content
--css
---site.css
--img
---someImg.png

I couldn't do

background-image: url(../img/someImg.png)

I had to do:

background-image: url(../../Content/img/someImg.png)

This worked locally in debug mode (no minification) and deployed to AWS (with minification) correctly.

Also, don't forget if you're using Bundle minification and you use @import in your CSS to still include the asset in the bundle. For example:

main.css
@import url(../../Content/css/some.css)

Be sure to include some.css in your bundle:

 bundles.Add(new StyleBundle("~/Content/global").Include(
                 "~/Content/css/some.css",
                 "~/Content/css/main.css"));

No need to do this if you're using LESS or SASS bundlers as the handler knows how to find the files and include them (that's the point!); however, if you're doing it as a straight CSS import, the bundler won't know to include it when it minifies.

Hope this helps someone!