If you have ASP.NET applications that live as subfolders of a larger site, you may find yourself with issues when it tries to find assemblies and httpmodules that are referenced in the parent’s web.config.
Fortunately this is something you can work around. Matthew Nolton goes through how you ‘remove’ these references at the subfolder level using the <remove> element.
This is all fine until you get an even tastier situation like I encountered the other day…
ASP.NET application ‘A’ lives as subfolder ‘B’ of both parent site ‘C’ and ‘D’. The configuration of ‘C’ and ‘D’ is slightly different (modules, handlers, assemblies etc). Why is this a problem you ask? We were trying to be a bit clever (and failed 🙂 ) by only deploying application ‘A’ once. Virtual directories in site ‘C’ and ‘D’ both point to the same physical ‘A’ folder. This effectively means that the stuff that needs to be removed from ‘A’ varies depending on which parent site you’re accessing.
OK – I could just fix this by duplicating the installation, and varying the configuration but….
You can also remove all modules by adding a ‘clear’ element as follows…
<httpModules>
<clear/>
</httpModules>
This is fine, BUT if you’re using Session State or any other in-built features that are implemented as httpModules then you’ll get exceptions as ASP.NET will give you a ‘null’ session for instance.
The following is probably a safe list of modules you’d normally need (maybe even only the session for simple apps), so just add them back in after the ‘clear’….
<httpModules>
<clear/>
<add name=”OutputCache” type=”System.Web.Caching.OutputCacheModule”/>
<add name=”Session” type=”System.Web.SessionState.SessionStateModule”/>
<add name=”WindowsAuthentication” type=”System.Web.Security.WindowsAuthenticationModule”/>
<add name=”FileAuthorization” type=”System.Web.Security.FileAuthorizationModule”/>
</httpModules>
This is nicer for a couple of reasons
- It shows what dependencies the application has on ASP.NET/external features, and…
- It gives you the power back to have the application consumed by multiple sites as you’ve effectively decoupled yourself from the parent’s dependencies.