While I understand that setting the IIS website properties to have default documents allows the following to work:

http://localhost/DotNetNuke/

http://localhost/DotNetNuke/default.aspx

I don't understand how it allows the following to work:

http://localhost/dotnetnuke/Host/Host%20Settings/tabid/16/portalid/0/Default.aspx

http://localhost/dotnetnuke/Admin/SiteSettings/tabid/39/Default.aspx

etc.

My reading of the IIS documentatation implies that default.aspx would also have to reside in all the subdirectores such as

/dotnetnuke/Host/Host Settings/tabid/16/portalid/0/

/dotnetnuke/Admin/SiteSettings/tabid/39/

which needles to say don't exist.  When I've tried create a simple website that hosts only default.html and has a couple of sub directories, it in fact requires that default.html exist in every directory for it to work.

In Java application servers, there is an ability to tell the server to match up to a certain portion of the url, e.g. "/dotnetnuke" in this case, and then hand the request to the association application.  But for the life of me I can't find similar capabilities in iis.

So what am I missing?

Jerome Dayton

Hi Jerome,

Just to elaborate a bit on Slavic's response, DotNetNuke accomplishes this magic through the use of HttpModules.  If you look in your web.config, you'll see, under configuration/system.web/httpModules the following entry:

<add name="UrlRewrite" type="DotNetNuke.HttpModules.UrlRewriteModule, DotNetNuke.HttpModules" />

You'll definitely want to read up on httpModules, but essentially each registered module has the opportunity to handle EVERY request that his the ASP.NET process (which includes nonexistant .aspx pages, but not by default .html or .gif pages).

So even for a nonexistent url such as http://localhost/dotnetnuke/tabid/39/Default.aspx, this httpmodule will get a chance to process the request.

That's the first piece of the puzzle.  The second piece is how the httpModule converts the request to a usable one.  This is essentially executed by converting the intermediate url tokens to querystring parameters.

So the above url is converted by the httpModule code to: http://localhost/dotnetnuke/Default.aspx?TabId=39.  Once the httpModule has performed this conversion, the URL is passed off for "normal" handling.

The converted url does exist at /localhost/dotnetnuke/Default.aspx, and is henceforth handled normally.  DNN picks up the desired TabId via querystring.

Naturally I've simplified things a bit, but this is the essence of what goes on behind the scenes.

Hope this helps!

Brandon

No problem Jerome, glad we could help.  For more details, download the DNN source package and look at /Library/HttpModules/UrlRewrite/UrlRewriteModule.vb.  Most of the action occurs in the OnBeginRequest method.

Brandon