Question

I’m trying to use an external configuration file to define multiple location elements within the the root <configuration> section of my web.config file. Is this possible?

I understand how to do this for a single section (e.g. connectionStrings) but can this be done for multiple elements within the configuration element? <configuration>; itself doesn’t allow the configSource attribute. Is it possible to create a dummy element and define it in configSections, if so what type do I give it?

Background information: I am wanting to do this so that I can define permanent redirects, there may be hundreds of them so ideally I don’t want to define this in web.config itself. i.e.

<configuration>
  <!-- rest of web.config here -->
  <!-- i need mutiple location elements so want these in an external file-->
  <location path="oldpage">
    <system.webServer>
      <httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="/uk/business" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />
    </system.webServer>
  </location>
</configuration>

Answer 1

Thought I’d add some more detail on this. As alluded to by CodeMonkey URL Rewrite module is the way to go, for more details on rewrite module http://www.iis.net/download/URLRewrite.

These are the changes I made to web.config defining rule and referncing external file (in system.webServer)

<rewrite>
  <rewriteMaps configSource="RewriteMaps.config" />                
  <rules>
      <rule name="Rewrite rule1 for StaticRewrites">
          <match url=".*" />
          <conditions>
              <add input="{StaticRewrites:{REQUEST_URI}}" pattern="(.+)" />
          </conditions>
          <action type="Redirect" url="{C:1}" redirectType="Permanent" appendQueryString="false" />
      </rule>
  </rules>        
</rewrite>

NB: also need to update VS XML Schema to stop it moaning quite so much
http://ruslany.net/2010/04/visual-studio-xml-intellisense-for-url-rewrite-2-0/
(make sure you see the comment on this blog re. updating the js for vs2010)