Publishing of the Project or Application is required for deploying to Test or
Production instance. Usually whenever we publish the WebProject using publish
option of (Visual Studio), it will publish only the known type of files and
folder to Published location. Like Style, Script, Images, MastePages and any
other folder which contain known type of files.
Known type of files are .master,.aspx, .ascx,.asmx,.svc, .js,.css, .png,.bmp
etc.
But if we have files like .pdf, .xls, .txt etc. then it will be not published
automatically. In that case we need to manually create folder and copy the files
to respective folder. Since we may not rember always do this while publishing
the code for Production or Test instance. Therefore to avoid such situation you
can follow below approach.
Consider the below example
I have created one project named TempProject which contain some files as shown
below.
![pic-1.PNG]()
Now when I publish it, it will publish below list of files and folder
![pic-2.png]()
In the above list the PDF folder files (GuideBook.pdf) has not been
published, to publish this file we need to modify the project file of
TempProject (TempProject.csproj). Refer the below step to do the same
- Open the project file in Notepad
- Go to <ItemGroup> option
- Add new group as <Content Include="Pdf\GuideBook.pdf" />
- Save the project file
Please refer below
![pic-3.png]()
Now after this changes when I publish again, I will able to see the PDF folder
and files
![pic-4.png]()
Note: Empty folder will be not published. So if you want to
publish a folder which will be not containing any files but later you will saved
files to that folder by using your application, in that scenario you can create
a temp or dummy files inside that folder.