ASP.NET 4 Mystery Bundle Xml Element

Question

Either my research skills are falling off, or there’s hardly anyone talking about this particular aspect of bundling in ASP.NET MVC.

First, let me show your picture of a bundling XML file that I found in the Scripts directory of a project which I downloaded from the Internet:

I have a couple of questions regarding that:

1 - where is this documented? If you open it in an editor, it looks this:

<bundle minify="true" runOnBuild="true">
     <!--The order of the <file> elements determines the order of them when bundled.-->
     <file>/Scripts/purl.js</file>
     <file>/Scripts/jQuery.cssParentSelector.js</file>
</bundle>

2 - How do you incorporate it in such a way that it has the chevron adjacent to the bundle file, and the util script files themselves indented (like code-behind)? When I added all of those files to another project, there was no chevron and no indenting.

This is clearly something to do with the bundling infrastructure. But I have no idea what or how. Perhaps WebGrease, although there is no footprint of it in the XML. Is it another 3rd party library that has created it?

Just curious, does anyone know what this is and how to grok it?

Answer 1

This bundle was pre-bundled using the Web Essentials Visual Studio Plugin. The Web Essentials plugin creates bundles that are done at compile time, Whereas the Asp.net MVC bundling is performed at runtime.