Question

I have IIS 7.0 on my development machine and IIS 6.0 on my server. On my development machine I was able to set a handler map on a directory within my site called /ViewHtml/ and I mapped it to asp.net. In my global.asax I check the request sent to asp.net for /ViewHtml/ and I serve the appropriate html file(html version of a Doc, Power Point, or Excel file) located outside this apps virtual directory. I am doing it this way because all files are permission protected, we didn’t want to put these files in are database due to scalability, and I need to hide the path to these file on the server. This all works in IIS 7.0 exactly how I would like it to. Although I have not been able to get my IIS 6.0 server configured to map all requests to that directory to asp.net.

Any ideas? Thanks Guys?

Answer 1

I set up a web application using the same configuration you’re using and I’m also getting the 404. I don’t know why it works in IIS 7, but here’s what I had to do to fix it.

Create a class that implements the System.Web.IHttpHandler class. move the the code from Application_BeginRequest to your implementation of IHttpHandler.ProcessRequest.

Now you just have to register your HTTP handler with ASP.NET. To do so add an entry in your Web.config at /configuration/system.web/httphandlers.

Web.config Example:

...
<httpHandlers>
    <clear />
    <add verb="*" path="*" type="namespace.classname, assemblyname" />
</httpHandlers>
...

That entry is telling ASP.NET to handle HTTP requests with any extension and any HTTP method by running the code in your HTTP hander. Note that I’m also clearing all the previously definded handlers (defined in the machine’s web.config).

Note that you will still need the Application Mapping configured in IIS.