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Make Combres work with ASP.NET

Dec 20, 2010 · Follow on Twitter and Mastodon
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After having problems with SquishIt when bundling JavaScript, I decided to give Combres a try. However, while SquishIt works right away, Combres must be configured quite a bit.

This page describes how to configure Combres for your project.

In short, you need to:

  • Create a custom Combres configuration file.
  • Add the following to Web.config:
    • A Combres configSection tag.
    • A Combres section tag (which you point to the Combres config file).
    • Two httpModule tags.
  • Add the following to Global.asax:
    • RouteTable.Routes.AddCombresRoute(“Combres Route”); in Application_Start.
  • Add <%= WebExtensions.CombresLink(“…”) %> where add JS or CSS tags.

With SquishIt, you only need to add a bundle tag to your page, which is easier. However, Combres is said to perform better and handles JavaScript closures better.

With Combres in place, I noticed that it didn’t work with IIS7 Integrated Pipeline mode.

If you run into this, remove all content in the Combres section tag, so that it looks like this:

<section name=”combres” type=”Combres.ConfigSectionSetting” />

Then, instead of:

<httpModules>
  <add name="ScriptModule" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule,
    System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
    PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
  <add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule,
    System.Web.Routing, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
    PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
</httpModules>

you must add the modules to the system.webServer/modules tag, since it’s the one that is used by IIS7 (keep the tags above as well, though):

<modules>
  <add name="ScriptModule" type="System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule,
    System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
    PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
  <add name="UrlRoutingModule" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingModule,
    System.Web.Routing, Version=3.5.0.0, Culture=neutral,
    PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
</modules>

If you follow these steps, Combres should work.