Develop Reference

Localhost Redirected you too many times DotNetNuke

I have a DotNetNuke application I am trying to setup on localhost.
The application was working fine until I tried to change database connection. After reverting back the changes I made in conenctionStrings, I am getting error whenever I try to run it. The error is
The localhost page isn’t working
localhost redirected you too many times.
Try clearing your cookies.
ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS
Well, obiously I tried clearing cookies and also tried on multiple browsers but getting same result. Page is not working.
What can be the possible reason ?

Without seeing any source code the best answer I can give you is this, something in your code if forcing a redirect to iteself, which then forces another redirect to itself, etc.
It would basically by the same as doing this,
void DoSomething() {
// Infinite loop, activate!
DoSomething();
}
If you provide some source code or a link to it in the question I could give you a more detailed solution, but as the question stands this is the best I can do.

I had this issue a while ago, setting the trust level to full trust (in web.config) solved it for me.
Happy DNNing!
Michael

Web API Should be returning custom JSON but returns back HTTP Status Code instead

I've discovered something peculiar that's been going on for the past 2 days.
I'm returning back custom JSON message in my Web API 2.0. E.g. when there's been an Unauthorized Response (HttpStatusCode 401)..it's only returning back the HttpStatusCode and NOT the JSON.
Simply put, anything apart from a HTTP Status Code 200 is NOT returning back the custom JSON that I've explicitly put in my ActionHandlers to return back.
This has happened recently, in the past 2 days. I've tested my code locally and I'm getting the expected output I need..the custom JSON error messages but as soon as I publish to one of my slots whether it be production or dev..only HttpStatus Codes are being returned.
Can anyone verify this for me? I need a way to sort this issue out or atleast have Azure take a look at this and tell me what to do. I suspect it's been an Azure update which I'm unaware of.

Probably some kind of customErrors logic kicks in when you are remotely testing your site. Those logics are usually disabled when browsing locally.
Check your configuration. Under IIS, there is also the httpErrors configuration which may interfere.
And have you set TrySkipIisCustomErrors to true when your code yields an error responses?

Ok, so I've figured out the issue.
Upgraded Visual Studio to 2015 to get the .NET Framework to use 4.6.
Changed all of my projects in the solution to point to 4.6, re-compiled, published and finally tested.
Errors are returning back JSON now too.
IMO, Azure could've atleast sent us an update. Anyways, posting this answer so hopefully anyone else using Web Api can easily forgo this issue.

Running WCF WebAPI Prev 6 inside MVC3 on AppHarbor, 404 Errors

I was trying to throw a quick WCF WebAPI project together up on AppHarbor tonight and ran into some issues. The WCF API is couched inside an empty MVC3 project just like is demo'd on the WCF CodePlex site. https://github.com/jptoto/Postmark-Response-Code-Generator The API itself is quite basic, when you type an http response error code on the end of the url the response will be the proper error code. So, for example, using http://responsecodes.appharbor.com/api/response/405 in Fiddler or some other http client will return the proper error response for a 405 error. (This API is just a convenient way to test with proper error responses).
Anyway, no matter what I try I get 404 errors from AH. I can't tell if the routing isn't working on what. When I download the built code from AH and run it locally inside IIS it runs fine, no problem.
If AH just doesn't support some kind of routing that is in WebAPI Preview 6 that's fine. I just want to cover all my bases. Thanks!!

It seems that you are using the wrong URL and that your app is running here: http://responsecodes.apphb.com/api/response/406
(apphb instead of appharbor)

POSTing to a re-written URL on IIS 6 doesn't work

I am working on a site which is programmed in C# .net. It uses a CMS called ADX Studio (a decision which predates my time there) which provides a shonky form of URL Rewriting (as far as I can tell it works by assigning an aspx page as the default 404 handler in IIS).
I have an web form which lives at a rewritten URL. I edited it so that the html form's action points back to the rewritten URL:
var u = new Uri(Request.RawUrl.Split(new char[1] { ';' }).Last());
userAdminForm.Action = u.PathAndQuery;
(kind of ugly but works based on what Request.RawUrl is on these rewritten URLs).
The "pretty" URL is something like this:
http://www.site.com/admin/user/edit/
On my development box (Windows XP/ IIS 5) when I initially tried POSTing back to URLs like this I got a HTTP 405 error. I worked around this by adding a script mapping so Aspnet_isapi.dll handles all (*) requests. And everything works fine on my development machine.
I just pushed my changes to the live server (Windows Server 2003 R2 and IIS 6) and the post fails silently. The page refreshes but all of my logic (from within an IsPostBack path in the code) doesn't get hit. No errors are displayed, it just doesn't work.
If I remove my code setting the .Action of the form then the postback works but it is posting to the ugly URL corresponding to the physical location of the aspx file rather than my page.
Am I missing a simple way to make this work? I don't want to be switching URL rewriting method or anything as this is a large legacy site and is unfortunately pretty dependent on ADX Studio so I don't want to do anything that will break that.
[edited because somehow the code above lost its code highlighting]

The issue is that the page's <form> tag is referencing the "ugly" url as the action. You can resolve that by completely removing the action tag from the form. Browsers will, by default, postback to the same page, ie. the "pretty" url.
This article explains how to accomplish an "actionless" form (~ two thirds of the way down) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx

It seems like the problem is the same as it was on IIS 5. I can get it to work by doing the following in the IIS Manager:
Right click on the relevant website and select "Properties"
Choose the "Home Directory" tab
Click "Configuration" down in the "Application settings"
Click "Insert" next to the "Wildcard application maps"
Browse to the location of aspnet_isapi.dll (in my case: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_isapi.dll )
Untick "Check that file exists"
Click "OK" back through the Russian doll of dialogs.
This is basically the same as the approach that I linked to in the question for IIS5. However, it's not optimal because IIS is running every request through asp (even static files). Which seems like it can only slow things down. I'd like to be able to specify that asp only needs invoking for HTTP POST requests at least.
The weird thing is that IIS5 gave a HTTP 405 error when POSTing to an extension without a registered ISAPI extension but IIS6 just fails silently. And the page is being run through IIS (I can debug with a breakpoint in the Page_Load function) but IsPostBack (and IsCrossPagePostBack) don't get correctly set. Could it be related to the view state? Is there any alternative to my solution described above?

I've come to what I think is an optimal solution for this problem. It turns out that ADXStudio CMS does use the default 404 rule to do some form of URL rewriting. This has a problem with http POST:
when IIS initially executes a custom
URL on a 404 error, it changes POST to
GET, even if the client does a POST
request.
(thanks to elite brains' blog post about setting up IIS6 and ASP.NET MVC).
Rather than creating my own HttpModule I decided instead to use Ionics Isapi Rewrite Filter to rewrite my URLs. I then set the 404 error handler in IIS to the default. And I created this IIRF.ini file to redirect all requests to the same format as the 404 handler produced:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /Default.aspx?404;http://%{HTTP_HOST}$1 [U,L]
And everything seems to work great. The advantage over my previous answer is that the rewrite code is low level and runs fast and the -f and -d switches mean that if a file actually exists it isn't re-written and so static files don't have the overhead of running through .net.

Running an MVC Application as a Sub-Application?

I'm attempting to create an MVC application as a sub-application to my standard Asp.Net Web application. Both of these projects are inside the same solution. While the parent application appears to be going fine, I'm having trouble getting the sub-application to work. After some massaging of my two web.configs, I was able to get the Asp.Net runtime to accept the configurations, but I have been unable to browse to any of the pages/controllers in the MVC application, including the root of the sub-application ("http://RootSite/SubApplicationName/"). I continually get 404's.
Actually, I do get a response when going to the url "http://RootSite/SubApplicationName/Home/Index/". It redirects me to index.aspx in that folder, and throws this error:
The view 'Index' or its master could not be found. The following locations
were searched:
~/Views/Home/Index.aspx
~/Views/Home/Index.ascx
~/Views/Shared/Index.aspx
~/Views/Shared/Index.ascx
The sub-application in IIS (7) is set up fairly straight forward: it's set to run in the same application pool as the parent app, which runs Asp.Net 2.0 in integration mode.
My suspicion is that I have something in the web.configs that is throwing it off. Are there things regarding, say, HTTPModules or URL authorization modules, etc., that I should confirm aren't getting in the way of MVC?
Also, in the global.asax.cs file, should the default route be different? By default, the url parameter passed to routes.MapRoute is:
"{controller}/{action}/{id}"
Should it be preceded by the name of the sub-application, like so?
"SubApplicationName/{controller}/{action}/{id}"
I attempted a change like that, but it did not fix things.
Any ideas are much appreciated. Also, general information about setting up an MVC web application as a sub-application would be great.
Thanks.

I did something similar, however not the same, I had to load views from a separate dll. In my case it was a class library, not a different web app, but it should work the same as far as I know.
The first thing you have to do is to create a VirtualPath Provider to tell the routing engine how to look for your stuff in the subapplication views. A great explanation of how to do this can be found here:
http://www.wynia.org/wordpress/2008/12/05/aspnet-mvc-plugins/
I'm sure that will get you started ;)

Make sure that you haven't made any spelling mistakes in the names of your Views directories. I was receiving the same error message and after 30 mins of head scratching realized that I had misspelled the folder name for one of my Views. The IDE did not pick this up in any meaningful way (i.e. it would have been nice if it explicitly told me that the path to the view that I was referencing was not correct -- "not found" could mean a few different things).

Sub application doesn't suite to MVC web application directly. you have to write a lot of hacked code in global.asax. Use sub domain rather than sub application.