I've been using Index.aspx as the 'home' file of my web applications directories for the past 5 years, but have only just recently started using Visual Studio for debugging sites.
The built in web server for Visual Studio has Default.aspx as the 'home' file.
When I click on a link such as /News?id=5, its not picking up on the Index.aspx file, and instead showing a directory listing.
This causes an issue because I'm sometimes passing querystring, which is then lost when going to the directory listing.
Therefore, should I cave in and do what Microsoft tells me, and use Default.aspx?
Is this what all other ASP.NET web developers do?
I think you can set this up in the web.config file.
[CORRECTION]: What I was thinking of is actually the section, which allows to setup 404 pages. You may use that to redirect to Index, but it might not be "good practice".
Hah, amazingly enough, somebody already asked almost the same question, and even another closely related one, that you probably may use to solve your issue.
You can also write an XML SiteMap file to setup Index.aspx as your toplevel page.
As per convention, as stated in my comment, ASPX.NET convention is to name the pages by the name of their controller's action method, such as Index.aspx, however all examples in the MS70-515 book are based on Default.aspx. My personal opinion therefore would be to use Default.aspx.
Related
I am contracted to support a legacy ASP.net WebForms application. It's a commercial web site, and it's quite old.
Yesterday, I received a trouble-ticket that seemed to defy everything I know about web applications.
The trouble-ticket indicated that a certain URL sometimes returned an HTTP 404 error. The submitter also swears that the problem only occurs when browsing the site with Chrome. The web application is available in English and French, but the trouble-ticket says that the problem only occurs on the French version of the web application.
The URL looks like this:
http://www.example.com/promotion/mg_547/SpecialOffer.search
I tried navigating to the page in my development environment: http://www.example.dev/promotion/mg_547/SpecialOffer.search. It seemed to work fine.
Although these URLs are fictionalized, "mg_547" is an actual directory name in the URL.
I decided to navigate to the file in Windows Explorer to see if there is something unusual about the file. That's when things became surreal.
When I navigated to the "promotion" directory, I found that there is no "mg_547" directory (and besides, what meaning could such a name have?). My understanding is that in an ASP.net WebForms application, URLs corresponding to files on a physical disk, but here, there is not file; there is no directory!
I checked that there isn't an "mg_547" virtual directory in IIS.
I carefully checked that there isn't an MVC controller hiding somewhere in the application and I reviewed the global.asax.cs file to see if there could be some unusual routing set up. I couldn't find anything that would explain what I'm seeing.
I decided that the text of the page must appear in my code base somewhere, so I selected some text from the page (being sure that it didn't contain HTML-encodings) and searched for the text in the code-base; no matches!
Therefore, as far as I can tell, it seems as if the IIS server is just making up this page with Satanic Black Magic!
I believe that I've found the answer. #EdSF's comment was very helpful.
There is a .net class called PageHandlerFactory which is overidden in the web application. Specifically, this class overrides the PageHandlerFactory.GetHandler method. The mg_547 directory name is parsed in this overridden method and maps the URL to a different file on disk.
As for the original trouble-ticket that started all of this, perhaps there could be a bug in this method that causes the 404 error.
This is just as I expected. This is a corner of ASP.net I've not yet become familiar with.
I am doing some work with Web.Routing, using it to have friendly urls and nice Rest like interfaces to a site that is essentially rendered by a single IHttpHandler. There are no webforms, the handler generates all the html/json and writes it as part of process request.
This works well for things like /Sites/Accounting for example, but I can't get it to work for the site root, i.e. '/'.
I have tried registering a route with an empty string, with 'default.aspx' (which is the empty aspx file I keep in my root folder to play nice with cassini and iis). I set RouteExistingFiles to false explicitly, but whatever I do when hitting the root url it still opens default.axpx, which has no code it inherits from, and contains a simple h1 tag to show that I've hit it.
I don't want to change the default file to redirect to a desired route, I just want the equivalent of a 'default' route that is applied when no other routes are found, similar to MVC.
For reference, the previous version of the site didn't use Web.Routing, but had a handler referenced in the web.config that was perfectly capable of intercepting requests for the root or default.aspx.
Specs: ASP.NET 3.5sp1, C#, no webforms, MVC or openrasta. Plain old IHttpHandlers.
Fixed my own problem: the issue is the integrated web server, Cassini or some such. Seems that it doesnt play nice with routing, and will by default simply return the default.aspx file or, if it is missing, show a directory listing.
Using IIS with a virtual directory works fine, but is annoying (frustrates code sharers because they need to set up new virtual directories when they open my app, and pollutes my own IIS instance. Bah. Probably what I'll do for the moment however, or setup a new application manually so I can use the domain host only path like what will exist in live.
An alternative is to use the updated version of cassini, seen here, which works if the default.aspx file is missing, but I have not worked out how to integrate it with visual studio yet. Any help would be appreciated, but its not a big priority given I have workarounds.
I realise that this is a really old post, but I just ran into the same problem using VS2012, so I'm posting this here just in case.
I solved the problem by installing IIS Express and setting the project to use IIS Express in Visual Studio. Solved the problem.
We recently rewrote our company homepage and have come across a peculiar error. We have very few pages that need any code behind them, so we wrote the website in static HTML served out of IIS6. The few pages that need any code (Contact Us, with a contact form, for instance) are .ASPX pages.
The previous version of the website had more .ASPX pages, even if there was no code in the code-behind. One of those pages was "management.aspx", and in the new site this is, logically enough, "management.htm". We're smart enough to not just change the file extension -- we rewrote everything, it just has the name in common.
Here's the peculiar part: Even though every link in the entire website points to "management.htm", IIS6 continues to try and serve "manangement.aspx". I've reset IIS, stopped/started the Default Web Site under IIS6, deleted pages from "Temporary ASP.NET Files" and deleted out temporary GZIP files from the server as well. This isn't MVC or anything, so we have no explicit URL routing, and while I can see us having to implement static file handling in our web.config httpHandlers, I can't imaging that being a necessity.
What gives? Why is IIS6 still trying to serve the old "management.aspx" page when we're explicitly asking for "management.htm"? What can I do to fix it?
Your bindings have to be off somewhere... check top level for *, *.htm, managment.htm, etc. Then check virtual directories.
If you paste "http://yoursite/management.htm" in your browser and you get a YSOD, this is an IIS issue for sure.
Check if you still have the bin folder in the root of your site.
Do you get a 404 because it tries to load management.aspx and it's not there?
Check the Default Page on the Website/Virtual directory in Question, and if it exists remove the reference to manangement.aspx.
Is there a way that I can have different directory names per installation of a website? As in I would need to rename the directories at build time or some similar solution. I am currently using MSBuild with CruiseControl.NET.
An example would be I have a module in my website called Bug Tracking which is then in http://mysite.com/BugTracking/.
One installation wants to leave it as BugTracking and another would like to call it "Issue Tracking" for whatever reason and have it in http://theirsite.com/IssueTracking/.
Re-writer rules
You could set up a re-writer rules so you could leave the directory name the same, and just add a re-writer rule for the clients that want it call something different?
IIS7
also look at Scott's blog
Doesn't solve the problem, kind of hides it I know. but its easy :)
or
ASP.NET Routing:
Also worth looking at would be ASP.NET Routing,
Using ASP.NET Routing Without ASP.NET MVC
or
Using Routing With WebForms
Why when I access an aspx (e.g., http://www.example.com/foo.aspx - not the real site) through IE6 would I get a 404 Error (i.e., "The page cannot be found") in IIS6
I've got scripts enabled for the website and I've tried with executables enabled as well.
Here is the full error:
The page cannot be found
The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or
is temporarily unavailable.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Please try the following:
Make sure that the Web site address displayed in the address bar of your
browser is spelled and formatted correctly.
If you reached this page by clicking a link, contact the Web site
administrator to alert them that the link is incorrectly formatted.
Click the Back button to try another link.
HTTP Error 404 - File or directory not found.
Internet Information Services (IIS)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Technical Information (for support personnel)
Go to Microsoft Product Support Services and perform a title search for the
words HTTP and 404.
Open IIS Help, which is accessible in IIS Manager (inetmgr), and search for
topics titled Web Site Setup, Common Administrative Tasks, and About Custom
Error Messages.
I can get to Default.htm in the same directory, so I know the path is right. I've opened it up to everyone (temporarily) so I know the permissions are right.
It could be a lot of things. I had this issue today because .NET had not been re-initialized after installing IIS (aspnet_regiis -i -enable or equivalent).
Check that the anonymous user under which the site runs has read access to the file foo.aspx.
IIS6 and later uses a 404 response, thereby not letting an attacker know whether such a file even exists.
I just happened to find another culprit for this issue. My foo.aspx page referenced a particular master page that had a <%# Register %> directive to a user control that did not exist. Removing the reference to the non-existent user control caused my foo.aspx to load instead of 404.
I found a solution here.
The real catch was using this:
Response.TrySkipIisCustomErrors = true;
The site is pointing to a different directory where the page is not.
It could be permissions, however I would think you would get an access error instead.
I'm assuming you are running IIS.
Check that www.example.com is going to the site that you think it is.
If you are hosting multiple sites on the same IP using host headers you may want to double check the name you are using is going to the site you think it is.
Ray and Joe probably have it. In order to serve any file type, IIS has to have a mapping for it. Aspx files require that they be mapped to the AspNet ISAPI dll, which the .Net installation normally takes care of. If you install IIS after .Net (and I'm sure there are other situations), you have to initiate this yourself by running aspnet_regiis.
ALTERNATE SOLUTION (same error perhaps different cause).
I had installed Visual Studio 2008 Pro without SQL Express it, and it caused this same error. Reinstallation of VS2008 with sql express included seemed to have corrected the problem, or perhaps the install took other actions. I did try to register ASP.net numerous times prior but no luck however it is definitely the most probable cause Just posting my experience for those pulling their hair as I was..
Thanks
If you register the .NET 4 version of IIS, you may find it's grabbed the registration of the aspx extension. If ASP.NET v4 is prohibited then 404 will be returned
I had this issue where some customers were reporting the 404.0 and some didn't have the problem at all(same page). I was able to navigate to any of the pages with no problems from my machine. Some customers would refresh and it would go away. I am using .Net 4.5.2 and IIS 7.5.
Looking at the IIS log file I would see:
sc-status sc-substatus sc-win32-status
404 0 2
sc-status.sc-substatus: 404.0 - Not Found
sc-win32-status: 2 - ERROR_FILE_NOT_FOUND
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms681382(v=vs.85).aspx
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_404
I found the problem was I had deployed a new version of the website in which the old version of the website had RouteConfig.cs/FriendlyUrlSetting setup by creating a project using the web forms template. The new version was created using an empty template. So obvious to me now.. no URL routing. Customers had a cache issue with certain pages on their machine(no .aspx extension) and having them clear browser data ultimately fixed the problem.
I got this issue when I tried using a different drive to host my apps. I ended up moving them to the wwwroot folder because it was working there and I did not have to time figure out why it is not working on the E:\ drive.
I had bin\roslyn compiler missing. Adding that all worked fine.
Check for double quote errors. I started getting a 404 on a single page because I accidentally had this:
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="ImageURL"">
instead of this:
<asp:TemplateField HeaderText="ImageURL">
For an aspx page, error 404 can be quite misleading! I have seen all the answers and they presuppose assuming various issues with the file, page, path, etc. but the simplest issues is the fact that if there is an error in your asp page (i.e bad format, improper usage of control, etc. asp will think the page does not exist and will post a 404 when in all actuality, it is easy to ascertain if there is a bad format by simply clicking on design mode. If the page does not render no need to do anything else but look at what is causing the render error, fix and viola'! Your page shows since it was never missing or can't be found, but it simple did not know how to display! Too often people go looking for the wrong solutions and waste so much time! Hope this helps somone. :-)