ASP.NET MVC Web Application can't find href link - html

Question

I have the following HTML in my Azure Web Application:
Please complete and return the
Terms of Service
The .csproj file does have this pdf included in it:
When I click "Launch Google Chrome" to test locally in Visual Studio and when I click on "Terms of Service", I get the following error:
But the file is there! It is on my file system. There is no encoding necessary. Why is this error shown and why can't the PDF be downloaded from the web app? Do I need another step to publish it? Please help!

Answer 1

By default, contents of Views folders are not supposed to be accessed by the normal request pipeline. The Views folder is home for the view files (.cshtml) which will be executed by the view engine. If you look at the web.config file located inside ~/Views you can see that we have a BlockViewHandler registered which prevents direct file access to all files.
<handlers>
<remove name="BlockViewHandler"/>
<add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*" verb="*" preCondition="integratedMode"
type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" />
</handlers>
You should consider moving your pdf file to a Statics directory in the app root and point to that.
Now, point to that location
Terms of Service
You can give your own name for the directory. Some people like to keep it under the Content directory. So it is more of a personal preference.
In asp.net core, the wwwroot directory is the static content home by default. So you may keep your static contents inside that (this is overridable)
You could make changes to the web.config located in the views directory to allow direct browsing, but the more solid approach is to not pollute the convention and move the static assets to it's own folder. If you absolutely want to enable direct file access to the view directory, you can update the path attribute value to tell mvc to prevent access to only files with a specific extension. Here is how you will prevent only .cshtml files ( so pdf will work)
<handlers>
<remove name="BlockViewHandler"/>
<add name="BlockViewHandler" path="*.cshtml" verb="*" preCondition="integratedMode"
type="System.Web.HttpNotFoundHandler" />
</handlers>