How to MapPath in an IIS7 Rewrite Provider? - iis-7

I am using the rather excellent IIS7 Rewrite module (V2), and want to create a custom RewriteProvider that rewrites differently depeneding on whether the physical file exists.
I have successfully created a provider, as in this tutorial:
http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/804/developing-a-custom-rewrite-provider-for-url-rewrite-module/
However, really need to be able to map the url to a physical path - I would normally do this via HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath() or HostingEnvironment.MapPath(), but it looks like the HttpContext has not been initialised (at least within the current App Domain - since the ReWrite module is native code, I'm having difficulty working out where I can get this information).
I don't really want to have to resort to creating my own rewrite module to get around this problem - anyone have any clues for me?
Thanks!
Mark.

You will not be able to get to it using those APIs since the code runs in a different AppDomain than the one ASP.NET is using.
The only way I can think to make this work is to pass the right Server Variable that includes the physical path to your extension and do a Path.Combine() yourself.
So assuming you have an extension called YourProvider that you are calling somehow like this:
{YourProvder:{URL}}
You can do:
{YourProvder:{APPL_PHYSICAL_PATH}|{URL}}
You can now get the physical path and the URL separated by a pipe | , make sure to pass the Physical Path first since the URL is in the control of external users you do not want them to trick you into getting a different physical path.

Related

Add subdirectory for locale based URL existing ASP.NET website, resolve relative paths correctly

Existing ASP.NET (MVC and webforms hybrid) website displays translated content. The language is based on a cookie that stores the user's preference. There is no change in the URL when the user changes the setting. The content is reloaded in the preferred language. For SEO, the locale should be included in the URL ( support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en).
I've tried the following:
1) Use URL Rewrite Module: (http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/setting-http-request-headers-and-iis-server-variables)
Issues:
- All hyperlinks and redirects still point to the old URL without the locale.
- Complex outbound rules required based on the folder structure and usage (mixture of absolute paths and relative paths e.g. ../, ~/, /).
- Also need to disable static compression as per documentation
- Performance considerations due to large size of Html.
- Postback results in runtime exceptions due to issue in the relative path rewrite.
- Paths defined in script files (ajax loading etc) are a huge challenge
- Base tag does not work as expected, because the Rewrite Module seems to append ../ (http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/url-rewrite-module/url-rewriting-for-aspnet-web-forms#Using_tilda)
2) IIS 7.5 Virtual Directory: Create Virtual Directory for each language and point it to the root. i.e. www.example.com is the root and www.example.com/fr-ca/ is a virtual directory mapped back to the root
Issues:
- Runtime exception in config file saying that the virtual directory needs to be converted to application
- Converting it to application gives 500.19 error due to duplicate entries in the web config (since the virtual directory is pointing back to the root)
- I tried moving the root to another subdirectory (i.e. have a physical directory for each language) to avoid web config conflicts, but that is resulting in some sort of "kernel" error. Also, this would mean changing the physical structure of the application, and also address routing issues
3) Using sub-domains:
I have also considered using sub-domains and hosting the application independently for each language, but this has a lot of drawbacks, including having to address scalability, single sign on, cookies, domain specific stuff like analytics etc.
So what is the least painful way to include a language sub-directory in the URL, and make all links relative to that sub-directory?
Note: The site contains a mixture of absolute paths and relative paths e.g. (../, ~/, /) sometimes used in conjunction with ResolveClientUrl, ResolveUrl
In the end, we went with option 2, with the below steps:
Create a new folder, deploy a copy of the application to the new folder. The new folder should be in a different directory from the root application.
Create a new virtual application* (not virtual directory) under the root application; 1 for each new language, pointing to the new folder. (If the need arises in the future, any of the virtual applications can point a different folder customized for that specific language)
In the new folder, remove the modules and handlers sections in the system.webServer section of the web.config file (they will be inherited from the parent web.config)
If you are using SQL session state, you will need to specify a custom Application Name in the web.config, and modify TempGetAppID stored procedure so that the Application Name is the same across all the virtual applications. See the following (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/toddca/archive/2007/01/25/sharing-asp-net-session-state-across-applications.aspx)
Hopefully, all the links are resolved on the server side using Url.Content (MVC) or ResolveUrl (webforms). If not, they need to be fixed. Any paths specified in javascript would not automatically resolve to the virtual application either (they would still be resolved to root application)
Test the heck out of it. Each and every link. (A tool like ScreamingFrog may help to make sure that no 404s are returned, methinks. But it wouldn't solve HTTP POST)
Note that depending on custom error handling, and any existing URL rewrite rules, the steps maybe different.
Summary: option 1 (URL Rewrite) is totally impractical. Option 2 (sub-directory) is the most practical solution, however it is not quite as straightforward as it should've been.

Running several sites off the same code except a config

I have the same code which will be used for several sites. In the Nginx config I wanted to have all the sites point to the same code folder.
I think this should work. The only catch is that I want each site to use a different config file.
How could something like this be achieved? Surely I wouldn't need to duplicate all the websites code just to have each one have a different config?
What language are you scripting in? Most languages will have a way to examine the incoming request. From this you could extract the domain name from the request and base which conf file you load based on the name using an if or switch statement.
You could also use a get variable for example www.domain.com/index.html?conf=conf1.conf. Then in your controller you'd need to look at that git variable to determine which conf file to load.
Either of these solutions should be easy to find in the docs for you scripting language.

Local Coldfusion server for multiple domains / URLs

I want to get CF9 with IIS 7 setup locally to run with multiple domains.
I have read this one but it doesn't say anything about the actual setup.
Need help with multiple URL setup on local CF9/Jrun install
I setup IIS so that I can start 127.0.0.1/domain1/index.cfm The page loads properly
but all subsequent links fail with
Could not find the included template: /_/definesession.cfm
But I see the file when typing in file:///C:/InetPub/wwwroot/domain1/_/DefineSession.cfm
The files are there but apparently the server is only reading the directory correctly
If I test http://127.0.0.1/domain1/_/BrowserDetect.cfm with no includes just a self contained file it executes properly.
The path in IIS is set to C:\InetPub\wwwroot\domain1
The bindings hostname is just domain1 no TLD
Also the second instance 127.0.0.1/domain2/index.cfm is working correctly. And here as well including subdirectories is failing.
ADDITIONAL NOTES: (added 1/3/12)
I guess it has to do with the CF mapping. I now moved the code to c:\coldfusion9\wwwroot\domain1_... and it sort of works.
In other words I start the program here: C:\inetpub\wwwroot\domain1\index.cfm Inside that index is for instance
But it executes the file located here: c:\coldfusion9\wwwroot\domain1_\definesession.cfm Just couldn't find anything in the web about mapping a local CF9 to that situation. Any idea??? –
You might have a ColdFusion mapping for "/" that needs to be adjusted.
OK I fixed it. There were multiple issues:
For whatever reason there were some issues with IIS and I had to reinstall it.
I had to make sure 9.0.1 was installed
I had to run Webserver Configuration Tool multiple times to actually get the Handler Mappings in order.
http://127.0.0.1/domain1/ was wrong - it must be http://domain1/ etc.
I forgot to add the domains to the host file on the machine - stupid me
I had to redesign my mapping to avoid overlaps between domains (i.e. mapping CFCs to /_/cfc/ on all domains needed to have different mapping names.
Now I have several different domains on my local machine and they work just fine.

How can I configure my data services in Flex to call the same domain that the SWF was served from?

I've got an HTTP service I defined in Flash Builder, via the "Data Services" tab. I've got an absolute URL in there right now.
What I really want is to not define a path that includes a domain name at all--I want the service to simply call an absolute path that's on the same domain as whatever domain the SWF was served from... can I do that? When I got rid of the base URL and then gave an absolute URL path (e.g., /roster/deleteMember), Flex Builder complained that "File does not exist." Well, of course it doesn't exist, it isn't a file, it's a URL to a service call--there is no corresponding file on the filesystem.
Can anyone advise me how to do that? If I change the domain name, it wipes out all the parameter definitions for the methods, so I have to go back to each method and setup the parameters again. Rather a headache.
Now, I would have thought this would work. from the adobe documentation:
The configuration files sometimes contain special {server.name} and {server.port} tokens. These tokens are replaced with server name and port values based on the URL from which the SWF file is served when it is accessed through a web browser from a web server. Similarly, a special {context.root} token is replaced with the actual context root of a web application.
So, if you specify the endpoint as
http://{server.name}:{server.port}/{context.root}, then
automatically on runtime, the variables are set by the flashplayer depending on where you've been downloaded the application.
Sounds great... but it's not working for me. I can't even set those values in the Flash Builder Data Services tool. Here's a recording of what I'm getting.
http://screencast.com/t/MTk0NzNiYzY
I'm not sure it's possible from the DS window.
If you were doing it in code, you could use Application.application.url to get where the swf had been loaded from.

Getting web address for local file in ASP.Net

Is there a 'correct' way to get the proper web address for a file under an ASP.Net application? For example, I have content in '/Content/Images/Gallery/2010-01-17/small/', and I would like to iterate through all of those files, and output to the browser a link.
Now, I can do it manually by working out the path from the files FullName or I can do it from knowing the current directory, but is there a proper ASP.Net way to do it?
As you can probably tell, I'd rather use the provided method if it exists :)
Regards
Moo
You can use the method ResolveUrl() for that. If your content directory is located directly under you web app's root directory, then this should work:
// "~" results in an URL to your web app's root directory
string imageBaseUrl = this.ResolveUrl("~/content/gallery/2010-01-17/small");
Then you can append the names of the images to that base URL.
I think ResolveUrl is only part of the answer.
Unfortunately, there is not a built-in function to return a full URL to a particular resource, inclusive of hostname and protocol. Part of the reason for this is that you can access a URL any number of ways... and the server is completely agnostic of the hostname. You have to look at either the Request.Url properties to build a new URL from the user's request, or use ServerVariables.
See this question:
How to Convert "~/default.aspx" to "http://www.website.com/default.aspx" C#?

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