How to disable Javascript/CSS minification in ASP.NET MVC 4 Beta

Question

I am just trying out ASP.NET MVC 4 but I can\'t figure out how to disable Javascript/CSS minification feature. Especially for development environment this will help greatly

Answer 1

Another option would be to create an HTML Helper that you could use to build the script and link tags. Here is what I have implemented for the Javascript, which can also be done for the CSS:

public static class BundleHelper
    {
        public static MvcHtmlString JsBundle(this HtmlHelper helper, string bundlePath)
        {
            var jsTag = new TagBuilder("script");
            jsTag.MergeAttribute("type", "text/javascript");

            return ReferenceBundle(helper, bundlePath, jsTag);
        }

        public static MvcHtmlString ReferenceBundle(this HtmlHelper helper, string bundlePath, TagBuilder baseTag)
        {
            var httpContext = helper.ViewContext.HttpContext;
            var urlHelper = new UrlHelper(helper.ViewContext.RequestContext);

            Bundle bundle = BundleTable.Bundles.GetBundleFor(bundlePath);
            var htmlString = new StringBuilder();

            if (bundle != null)
            {
                var bundleContext = new BundleContext(helper.ViewContext.HttpContext, BundleTable.Bundles, urlHelper.Content(bundlePath));

                if (!httpContext.IsDebuggingEnabled)
                {
                    baseTag.MergeAttribute("href", System.Web.Optimization.BundleTable.Bundles.ResolveBundleUrl(bundlePath));
                    return new MvcHtmlString(baseTag.ToString());
                }

                foreach (var file in bundle.EnumerateFiles(bundleContext))
                {
                    var basePath = httpContext.Server.MapPath("~/");
                    if (file.FullName.StartsWith(basePath))
                    {
                        var relPath = urlHelper.Content("~/" + file.FullName.Substring(basePath.Length));
                        baseTag.MergeAttribute("href", relPath, true);
                        htmlString.AppendLine(baseTag.ToString());
                    }
                }

            }

            return new MvcHtmlString(htmlString.ToString());
        }
    }

Now all that you have to do is call it in your view:

    
    
    
    
    
    @Html.JsBundle("~/scripts/js")
    

And it will render the scripts as separate references, or use the new bundling/minification feature depending on what the debug setting is in your web.config . I used some of the code from http://codecutout.com/resource-minify-bundling as a reference when creating my helper if you wanted to see some more examples. Their helper is written a little better, throwing exceptions when invalid arguments are supplied, etc.... I just haven't gotten around to cleaning mine up yet.