Separate MVC application as a folder using Handler Mapping - c#

We have a legacy webforms app and a new section of our site developed with MVC. It works a treat as an application in the Default Web Site in IIS.
Only downside is that the root site's session object isn't passed to the application. We have a work around for this.
A consultant is convinced that we don't need to set it up as an application and it can all be done via handlers and route mappings. He conveniently has not provided us with any details though and I have been tasked to implement it.
The best I have achieved was to add a Module Mapping to the Handler Mapping section in IIS. This filters coolmvcapp/* with Module isapimodule to a virtual directory who's physical path points to our new MVC app. The result is an empty page with a 200 response. Most other combinations I have tried resulted in a variety of errors. (Turns out an empty page is returned without adding the handler mapping - hey ho)
So, is this approach even possible?
I am aware that MVC and webforms can be merged together but for reasons this is something that we want to avoid.

Related

Is there a way to have IIS default document (default.asp) take precedence over .Net routing?

I am trying to migrate a site from classic ASP to .Net (using WebMatrix). I am planning on mixing the new .cshmtl pages in with the legacy .asp files and slowly migrate the site over time. To date, I have individual .asp pages for each piece of content (each url). As I move to .Net, the content will be coming from a database, so there will not be specific pages for each url. I love the power of routing that is available in .Net and it works well and plays nicely with the classic ASP with one exception so far.
My example is that I have an ASP page located at /crafts/default.asp and currently reference that everywhere as just /crafts/. The IIS default document setting takes care of serving the default.asp page when i just reference /crafts/. I want to start to post new items into this area of the site but run as .Net pages. so I created a /crafts.cshtml page which is designed to handle different urls and go to the database and lookup the item and display the info. So as an example I have legacy page at /crafts/fall-crafts.asp and this works fine - because there is an .asp page sitting there named that. But when i reference /crafts/ .Net takes over and serves the /crafts.cshtml page instead of serving the /crafts/default.asp file. Is there something I can do to keep the power of .Net routing in place, but still have IIS serve the default document in this case?
Modify your RouteConfig
public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
routes.IgnoreRoute("crafts/");
...
See RouteCollection.Ignore for documentation.
Similar question (mentions some other possibly needed workarounds): Ignore folder in ASP .NET MVC
The default "routing" built into the Web Pages framework relies on matching incoming URLs to physical files on disk, looking first for the existence of cshtml or vbhtml files. All the time you have a crafts.cshtml file at the same level as a folder called crafts, the file will be served first. The solution is to remove or rename you crafts.cshtml file, but currently that will mess up your URLs.
There is a package which offers greater management over routing in Web Pages applications. It's called Routing For WebPages. It allows you to route URLs to any file name you like. You can download that via the Package Manager or Nuget and read this article that I put together that explains how to use it: http://www.mikesdotnetting.com/Article/187/More-Flexible-Routing-For-ASP.NET-Web-Pages.

Restfull urls for ASP.NET page on IIS

Ok I had a huge Issue giving this a proper title, my excuses for that.
Anyways I have started slowly to look at Web and ASP.NET again, I am a C# developer but I have mostly worked with Windows applications the past 5 years or so, It is not that I haven't touched the web as such in that time, but this is as web services (Restfull as well as the ugly SOAP services) I have also worked with more "raw" web requests.
But I have not worked with IIS or ASP.NET in all that time.
What I would like to do is hos a web page that uses a URL style I could best describe with "like rest", hence the "Restfull urls" title. Because I think most people thinks of such URL's in terms of:
http://example.com/item/
http://example.com/item/23/
and so forth. Not that they have to look like that, however I would like to use such URL's instead of
http://example.com/item?id=23
I know subtext does this, but i have not had any luck finding it in their code base.
Now as far as I can tell I could just implement some IHttpHandler's, but at least for the examples I have seen of that, they write the page source back in code, and I still have master pages etc. I wish to use instead of taking over all that stuff my self, I really just kinda wants to route http://example.com/item/23/ to http://example.com/item and asking for the item with id 23...
I hope this makes sense at all >.<... And that someone has some better examples at hand that what I have been able to find.
You can achieve this using Routing here is a link to an MSDN blog, The .Net Endpoint - Using Routes to Compose WCF WebHttp Services that should get you started.
If you're looking at asp.net/IIS, another option to look at is ASP.Net MVC. It's pretty straight forward to create RESTful services.
Here's a tutorial:
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/233572/Build-truly-RESTful-API-and-website-using-same-ASP
So here are your options-
For .net 3.5 sp1 framework with IIS7 you can use asp.net routing feature to have MVC style urls that you mentioned should create a custom route handler implementing IRouteHandler interface as explained here How to: Use Routing with Web Forms and register your route rules in Application_Start method in Global.asax. For your example you can register a route like this
routes.Add("ItemRoute", new Route
(
"item/{itemId}",
new CustomRouteHandler("~/item.aspx")
));
and then you can access itemId in your routed item.aspx page by checking request context item
requestContext.HttpContext.Items["itemId"]
For .net framework 4 MVC you dont have to create a custom handler, you can directly use
routes.MapPageRoute("ItemRoute", "item/{itemId}", "~/item.aspx");
in you global.asax Application_Start method.
This link explains more about the Routing
A way of achieve this is using URL rewriting.
If you're planning to host your Web application in Internet Information Services 7.x, you can take advantage of IIS URL Rewriting Module:
http://www.iis.net/download/urlrewrite
URL rewriting is just mapping a friendly URL to an unfriendly, common one, which is programming-friendly to inspect GET parameters.
For example:
http://yourdomain.com/item/48 => http://yourdomain.com/Items.aspx?Id=48

ASP.NET MVC 2 "RequiresRole" attribute does not work

I'm developing a ASP.NET MVC 2 web application. So far, I managed to define access rules for every controller function, using "RequiresRole" attribute.
Suddenly, this way of defining access rules stopped working (now every user can invoke any of the controller methods). :S. I tried debugging, and it seems that user-roles are correct. I tried reviewing web.config, but did not find anything suspicious.
Don't know what else could be the problem.
Any ideas??
RequresRoleAttribute is intended for use on WCF domain data services, not MVC controllers. I believe the attribute you should use is AuthorizeAttribute, setting the Roles parameter.

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.

Using a custom URL rewriter, IIS6, and urls with .htm, .html, etc

I have a custom site I'm building with automatic url rewriting using a custom engine. The rewriting works fine as long as the page url doesn't end in somehting like .htm or .html. For these pages it goes directly to the iis 404 page instead of hitting my rewriting engine first.
I have the * wildcard handler in the "Home Directory" section of the IIS6 configuration of that website but these urls seem to be ignored by it (altho things like css, jpg, js, etc to get sent to the url handler in my web project). How do i set up IIS6 to force these urls to get sent to the handler, while still serving the page if it exists normally?
The handler basically does this
if (!File.Exists(Request.Path))
{
doMyRewriting();
}
I have to assume that using a block like this (just and example, the real one does some other stuff to format the Request.Path to be proper with everything) should run the "doMyRewriting()" if the requested file does not exist otherwise it will serve the page normally. Am I mistaken?
If I tell IIS specifically to send .htm and .html pages thru to the .NET handler the rewriting works but if the page is actually there it will not serve it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
Don't know if you can or would want to do this, but there is the Ionics Isapi url rewriter you can use.
http://www.codeplex.com/IIRF
Basically install that then set a rule to remove the .html that way it hits your rewrite engine. I use it on IIS 6 with several of my blogs.
I think if you are having IIS send all requests to .NET and your handler, then your handler will need to detect if the page exists and serve it instead of rewriting.
UrlRewriting.NET has an option to do this - you might want to look at their code to see how they're handling this case.
In my opinion, rewriting URLs with IIS 6 is best handled with an ISAPI filter written as unmanaged native code. Otherwise, you run into the issues you've mentioned - having to map all extensions to ASP.Net and losing the ability for simple file handling. With an ISAPI filter, you can choose to not rewrite some URLs and let IIS handle them as normal.
To get started, I suggest reading the ISAPI Filter Overview on MSDN.
If your filter absolutely needs the .Net framework runtime, it is possible to write a small ISAPI filter shell that hosts the CLR and forwards the requests to some managed code. The Filter.Net Framework takes this approach and may be suitable for your needs. There is the small drawback to this approach in that you will have to use the same .Net version as any ASP.Net applications that are run in the main IIS process.

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