azure - loading .json files generates 404 errors

Question

My first Azure website is a simple test site I've had for a while that makes ajax calls back to the server for JSON data. All the data files have .json extensions. Azure will not 'see' these files. If I change the extension to .txt it servers them up fine.

Do I have to muck with IIS to get this .json to be seen?

Answer 1

I too found Ahmed Sabbour's blog post helpful, but it created an additional problem for me. Whilst the fix worked for the Azure Web App when I then tried to run the app locally it died horribly, throwing HTTP 500.19 everywhere. It took me a while to figure out how to fix this whilst maintaining a single web.config. The solution was (albeit a bit of a fudge) to remove the fileExtension first and then add it back in:

<staticContent>
  <remove fileExtension=".json" />
  <mimeMap fileExtension=".json" mimeType="application/json" />
</staticContent>

For my narrow purposes this was fine and I hope this might save someone time trying to figure this out.