Question

I was wondering if it is possible to run an aspx.net website in a sub folder if it has it’s own web.config with forms auth and is using a role mananger?

Answer 1

I’ve done this for nested applications recently. Its not too difficult.

In addition to having access the same data store for credential and role data, you need to:

• make sure the the machineKeys are the same for both web applications
• configure loginUrl’s to resolve to the same absolute path
• if you’re using cookies you need to make sure that the domain is set to a value available to both web applications
• also for cookies, if your web applications are nested at diferent levels in a domain make sure that the path attribute is set to “/”

See this blog post for more detail on getting forms authentication working.

Another issue particular to nested applications is that by default your nested web.config will inherit settings from the parent app’s web.config. This means that you may need to strip out some items in the child config that are in the parent config, and remove items that are currently in the child app config but would already be present in the parent config. See this for more detail.