We are using the Intelligencia URLRewriting module for asp.net with version 2.0 of the framework and IIS6. Our URLs typically have no extension.
I understand that IIS6 cannot really deal with this situation without a blanket wildcard (which causes other problems).
However, it works! Sometimes. At other times (e.g. on one dev's machine, and on my machine when I point a different virtual directory at the app) it doesn't. By "it doesn't work" I mean the configured HttpModules never even get hit.
Can anyone explain this?
Thanks.
So it turns out what was happening was the following:
request comes in to (say) http://website/products/productid
IIS can't find this hence we get a 404
by chance we have a custom error page set up in IIS for 404s
this error page sticks the referring URL on the end of the 404 error.aspx page
so we get a redirect coming into asp.net along the lines of:
http://website/error.aspx?404;http://website/products/productid
our URLRewriting regexes were now set up in such a way that they discarded the error.aspx bit and dealt with http://website/products/productid as if it were the actual URL
so asp.net renders http://website/product.aspx?id=productid as requested!
I guess this could prove to be a useful kludge for someone, but we're moving to an isapi filter. One heads-up is that this will by default lead to a tight loop of redirects!
If you run a site using the Visual Studio development web server all requests will be handled by asp.net so your HttpModule will run.
On IIS6 this should not happen unless it is set up to forward the requests to asp.net.
Are you sure that when "it works" you aren't running under the Cassini development web server included in VS.NET ? Because extensionless wildcards do work under Cassini, which can be very confusing to say the least.
If you are using an IIS6 with ASP.net 4.0, you must specify and register the modules like this:
<system.web>
<httpModules>
<add name="UrlRewriter" type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule, Intelligencia.UrlRewriter"/>
not
<system.webServer>
<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">
<add name="UrlRewriter" type="Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.RewriterHttpModule, Intelligencia.UrlRewriter"/>
</modules>
Related
I have taken over the maintenance of a production website at a new job that is written in ASP.NET 4 Webforms and that runs on IIS 6 on Windows Server 2003. I am not familiar with Webforms nor managing IIS...so I am kind of working things out as I go here.
I have done several deployments to our production server which have worked fine, but am now setting up a test environment that is identical, just a different IP address/domain, so we can properly test changes first.
I have a problem where on this test site any URL that does NOT end with a reference to a file (always .aspx on this site) will return a 403 error on this server. For example http://users.test.oursite.com/admin will always return a 403 error when logged into the site. It should be redirecting to http://users.test.oursite.com/admin/organisation.aspx. Having an MVC background I am not even sure how this happens...but it does in production.
Browsing links within the site is fine as they always reference an .aspx file. Manually typing URLS that reference an .aspx file is fine, just not when the URL does not contain a file. This is not a problem on the production server.
As I said, I am not familiar with WebForms or managing IIS itself...so I have kind of run out of places to look.
Is there anything that comes to mind that I should be looking at that could be causing this problem?
In WebForms typically there is no routing involved.
You need to either provide a full path on the URL ending with .aspx OR
setup default documents for your website. (Index.aspx, Default.aspx etc.)
http://www.iis.net/configreference/system.webserver/defaultdocument
OR
<configuration>
<system.webServer>
<defaultDocument enabled="true">
<files>
<add value="home.html" />
</files>
</defaultDocument>
</system.webServer>
</configuration>
Default documents can be setup in IIS Properties or via web.config.
Otherwise you need to provide the full path.
And because you haven't setup the DirectoryBrowsing (in IIS), you get a 403 Error when you try to access the Directory.
Enable the Directory Browsing option in IIS (not recommended) if you want this error to go away.
We have a site running on MOSS 2007 which makes calls to custom web service asmx methods on the same domain from the client.
At first everything works fine, but after a bit of time has passed the service will start to fail with:
http://[domain]/_layouts/error.aspx?ErrorText=Request format is unrecognized for URL unexpectedly ending in %27%2FIsSuspectWaterLevel%27.
Interestingly enough
http://[Domain]/_vti_bin/Custom/CustomFunctionality.asmx?op=IsSuspectWaterLevel
is still available, but a call to
http://[Domain]/_vti_bin/Custom/CustomFunctionality.asmx/IsSuspectWaterLevel
will fail as described.
We've found that "touching" C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\Web Server Extensions\12\ISAPI\ web.config will bring the webservice back to life.
The asmx file lives at
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\ISAPI\ECan\MyECan_ComplianceWaterUsage.asmx
Any ideas of what might be going on here and how to resolve them?
Some extra detail:
App pool settings in case they're useful: http://i51.tinypic.com/x51qw.png
The following web.config settings are present in the root and sub directory hosting the asmx:
<system.web>
<webServices>
<protocols>
<add name="HttpSoap" />
<add name="HttpGet" />
<add name="HttpPost" />
</protocols>
</webServices>
...
</system.web>
We are calling the web service from javascript (jQuery). I've checked all the settings mentioned in this link and all match. I think calling from javascript may not be the culprit though as going directly to
[domain]/_vti_bin/Custom/CustomFunctionality.asmx/IsSuspectWaterLevel
with parameters supplied also fails with the same error - no javascript involved. Failing after a short period of time has passed, but works fine when web.config has just been "touched" again.
Thanks in advance for any help! Cheers, Gavin
I'm currently working on the same problem, and I think you barked the wrong tree.
The problem is, that in the ISAPI folder of SharePoint is a web.config with the following lines:
<webServices>
<protocols>
<remove name="HttpGet"/>
<remove name="HttpPost"/>
<remove name="HttpPostLocalhost"/>
<add name="Documentation"/>
</protocols>
</webServices>
The problem is, that the desired protocols POST and GET will be removed for the entire ISAPI folder and its subfolders. I also tried to reactivate the protocols via
<location path="[Path to my Web Service].asmx" allowOverride="false">
<webServices>
<protocols>
<add name="HttpGet"/>
<add name="HttpPost"/>
</protocols>
</webServices>
</loaction>
in different places (machine.config, web.config of root folder, web.config app.config, ...), but it didn't last.
The only thing that worked, was, to change the "remove" items in the web.config of the ISAPI folder to "add" items.
But this has the nasty side effect, that the built-in web services, like "Lists.asmx" throw errors if you try to request their documentation pages...
If you can live with that, this would be your solution. I can't, so I still try to figure out a way to make my
<add name="protocol">
items persistent.
By the way: Also adding lockItem="true" to the <add/> items didn't do the trick...
Chris
It has been awhile since I have touched Sharepoint so this is a shot in the dark. If I remember correctly modifying anything in the web.config will restart the website in IIS. So what you may be seeing is IIS restarting the website that hosts the webservice putting it back into a good state.
Do you have the following in the web.config for the web application?
<webServices>
<protocols>
<add name="HttpGet"/>
<add name="HttpPost"/>
</protocols>
</webServices>
This is a strange problem and hard to diagnose due to the number of occcurances of the 12 hives web.config protocols issue which would appear to resolve 99% of the cases of this issue.
There is another issue called URL rewriting that will cause this
problem.
Some reverse proxy devices can modify the path of a request (the
portion of the URL that comes after the hostname and port number) in
such a way that a request sent by the user to
http://www.contoso.com/sharepoint/default.aspx, for example, is
forwarded to the Web server as
http://sharepoint.perimeter.example.com/default.aspx.
This is referred to as an asymmetrical path. Windows SharePoint
Services 3.0 does not support asymmetrical paths. The path of the URL
must be symmetrical between the public URL and the internal URL. In
the preceding example, this means that the "/sharepoint/default.aspx"
portion of the URL must not be modified by the reverse proxy device.
Even more depressing is that microsoft knows about this and actively refuses to support it.
Ref: URL Rewrite + SharePoint = No Support
Also : SharePoint, url rewriter, WebServices
An inelegant workaround to this issue that works for us: We've swapped out the web service asmx end point for a web handler ashx endpoint. This doesn't suffer the same issue for some reason.
I'm guessing from this that there's some issue creeping in after a period of time which is causing urls to resolve incorrectly. I suspect that the / after the .asmx in the url is the curprit. The ashx endpoint implemented is working purely on url parameters and posted data.
Obviously this work around won't always be an option for others who might experience the same issue as we're loosing a lot of the rich web service functionality that's pre-baked in to an asmx endpoint.
Unfortunately I won't be able to test any other solutions that people might put forward from now on as we've moved away from the web service asmx approach. Sorry. Thanks for all the suggestions though - it's been very much appreciated!
I've created an httpModule to handle URL remappings, and it works great on my test system. A request for www.mydomain.com/Some_Fancy_URL gets rewritten to www.mydomain.com/some.aspx?fancy=23 and so on.
When I deploy to the actual web site, I'm getting the default IIS 404 page though.
After doing some research online, it would seem that I need to setup "Wildcard Mapping" in IIS 6 to get the request past IIS and in to my httpModule. The problem is that the site is hosted on a shared server, so it may not be possible to get the ISP to make that change.
My question is, can't I use an httpHandler to tell IIS how I want these requests handled? For example:
<httpHandlers>
<add path="*.aspx" verb="GET,POST" type="System.Web.UI.PageHandlerFactory" validate="false"/>
</httpHandlers>
It would seem like adding this to my Web.Config should tell IIS to stop validating the existence of .aspx files, and just pass the request along for me to process. It doesn't work though.
Any suggestions?
The problem with IIS 6 and ASP.NET is that they're aren't integrated. IIS needs to be told about ASP.NET via script mappings (.aspx, .asmx, wildcard and so on).
None of your web.config configuration settings will influence IIS because web.config is there to configure ASP.NET's behaviour, not IIS. IIS has no knowledge of web.config.
Unless you can hand off a request to the ASP.NET pipeline (via a script map) nothing will happen and all your web.config settings will be ignored.
With IIS 7 the story is quite different. In IIS7, ASP.NET and IIS are closely integrated and share the same pipeline thus permitting you to achieve the result you're looking for.
The alternative may be to find out if your hoster runs a URL rewriter such as ISAPI_Rewrite on their servers. That way you could rewrite urls without having to map a wildcard scriptmap to IIS6.
Through some trial and error, along with more web searches, I found a solution. It essentially parallels Kev's answer.
IIS won't treat a request as .NET unless it has a known file extension (.aspx, .ascx, etc.). When I send along something like www.mydomain.com/anything it looks for a file or folder named "anything", and when it doesn't find one, it just drops off to the default IIS 404 handler.
That's where I took over. I changed IIS 6 to forward 404 problems to /404.aspx. I then created that page with a generic "Your file wasn't found" message in the same style as my web site.
Here's the good part: Now that IIS is sending 404's to a .NET page, the custom httpModule I created is getting fired. The request is for 404.aspx, but IIS is nice enough to also append the original URL as well. You get something like:
www.mydomain.com/404.aspx?404;http://www.mydomain.com/anything
This allows me to parse the request in the httpModule, and rewrite as needed!
I've used the UrlRewriting.Net module for a couple years now without any problems in Windows XP and Windows 2003. I just recently upgraded my home PC to Windows 7 and started developing a new website.
The plan was to use .html extensions and rewrite them to their .aspx counterparts using the UrlRewriting.Net module. Everything works flawlessly in VWD 2008, but when I try running it through IIS7 it is a different story.
When I try to access a page via the .html rewrite I can no longer access Page.User; it keeps returning null. If I hit the page using it's .aspx extension, Page.User is correctly populated. I should also mention that I have a LoginView controller in my Master Page and it suffers from the same symptoms: When accessing via .html extension it shows the AnonyousTemplate; When using .aspx extension it properly shows the LoggedInTemplate. I'm guessing the two are related.
[Note: I've also tried extensionless URLs and they exhibit the same problem]
The only way I've gotten it to work is to switch the application pool to Classic, which then requires me to add an ASP.Net ddl handler for the .html extension [otherwise it is handled by the StaticFileHandler and comes up as a 404 error]. However, I'd like my web app to run properly for people without having to fiddle around with IIS.
So I am left with several questions:
Does anyone have ideas as to why Page.User always equals null for .html => .aspx rewritten pages?
Why does it work in VWD 2008, but not IIS7?
What changed from IIS6 => IIS7 that could have caused this?
Any other thoughts on workarounds?
[Note: I just tried a .aspx => .aspx rewrite and it did not exhibit the problem. Not really what I want, but thought I should mention it.]
Just had a breakthrough with the UrlRewriting.Net module. This makes it work in Integrated Mode in IIS7:
<modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">
After figuring it out I did a search on "runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests" and the first thing that popped up was Scott Guthrie's blog which actually talks about using it for this purpose.
Another approach that seems to work is to remove the Session module and readd it leaving the "Invoke only for requests to ASP.NET applications or managed handlers" checkbox unchecked. It looks like this in the web.config file:
<system.webServer>
<modules>
<remove name="Session" />
<add name="SessionManualAdd" type="System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule, System.Web, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" />
</modules>
</system.webServer>
It seems the problem is that the Session module doesn't execute for say '*.htm' files when HttpContext.RewritePath is used, but removing and readding the module in this fashion causes the Session handler to be executed for the request.
This solution was suggested on the thread below. Unfortunately Microsoft chose not to explain the reasoning behind this behavior fully:
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/357248/context-rewritepath-disables-session-module-in-iis7
Microsoft included a fix for this issue (at least for extensionless urls) in Service Pack 1 for Win7 and Windows Server 2008 R2:
http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5842
Also available as a hotfix: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980368
After this patch is applied, ASP.NET 4 applications can handle requests for extensionless URLs. Therefore, managed HttpModules that run prior to handler execution will run. In some cases, the HttpModules can return errors for extensionless URLs. For example, an HttpModule that was written to expect only .aspx requests may now return errors when it tries to access the HttpContext.Session property.
After applying SP1 or the hotfix, no web.config changes are needed to make the session and forms auth work for extensionless URLs rewritten to asp.net pages/handlers/etc.
I don't know if this fixes anything for rewrites to static file extensions like .htm. My guess is, probably not. I would try to avoid setting runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" in production environments, because it adds unnecessary overhead on static file requests.
I wrote a tiny HttpHandler, which works beautifully on my machine. However, once it was deployed to our staging server, requesting it gave an 404. I usually prefer configuring HttpHandlers in web.config, but this apparently didn’t work on the server: I fixed it by creating an .ashx file containing just the reference to my HttpHandler.
The .ashx file:
<% # WebHandler class="MyNamespace.MyProject.MyHttpHandler" %>
The web.config setting:
<httpHandlers>
<add verb="GET" path="myhandler.ashx" type="MyNamespace.MyProject.MyHttpHandler"/>
</httpHandlers>
I assume the problem is caused by the server using a "special" port (888, don’t ask why) for the website. Can it be something else, what could I be missing?
Why am I seeing this behavior on the server? The HttpHandler runs fine on my local machine with configuration just in web.config, and here it’s also served from a “random” port, i.e. http://localhost:61229/myhandler.ashx.
It sure sounds like the web.config setting is not being found.
Is this IIS 7 by any chance? In that case make sure you're putting the handler in the <system.webServer> and its <handlers> section.
If you are using IIS7 but still want to keep your old IIS 6 config files.
By setting the Application pool to run in "Classic" mode, the handler will work again.
Not recommended, but sometimes this is a quick and good enough fix.