Host Static HTML or WebForms Page within MVC Site

If you need to host a static HTML page within an ASP.net MVC website or you need to mix ASP.net WebForms with an MVC website then you need to configure your routing configuration in MVC to ignore requests for those pages.

Recently I wanted to host a static HTML welcome page (e.g. hello.htm) on an MVC website. I added the HTML page to my MVC solution (setting it as the Visual Studio project’s start page) and configured my web site’s default page to be the HTML page (hello.htm). It tested ok at first but then I realised that it was only displaying the hello page first on debug because I’d set the page to be the Visual Studio project’s start-up page and I hadn’t actually configured the MVC routes correctly so it wouldn’t work once deployed.

For this to work you need to tell MVC to ignore the route if its for the HTML page (or ASPX page in the case of mixing WebForms and MVC). Find your routing configuration section (for MVC4 it’s in RouteConfig.cs under the App_Start folder, for MVC1,2,3 it’s in Global.asax). Once found use the IgnoreRoute() method to tell Routing to ignore the specific paths. I used this:

routes.IgnoreRoute("hello.htm"); //ignore the specific HTML start page  
routes.IgnoreRoute(""); //to ignore any default root requests 

Now MVC ignores a request to load the hello HTML page and leaves IIS to handle returning the resource and hence the page displays correctly.