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Any Impact of IIS virtual Dir pointing to Workarea

dcjung

Hi,

We're trying to implement a solution to enable "in context" previews of page templates. The solution consists of creating a workarea to house "common" files such as includes, stylesheets, images. Then we create an IIS virtual directory under the Default Web Site that points to the 'common files workarea'. We also want to enable this workarea as a network share to allow developers to maintain the includes.

I've heard there are some potential downsides to this approach including stability of the "Y drive" from having shared connections to it, and also IIS binding issues when it is restarted and there are virtual directories pointed at workareas on the Y drive. Has anyone heard of any official recommendations against this type of configuration?

We tried storing the common files on the "D Drive" of Teamsite, and created a virtual dir pointing to it but the previews weren't able to resolve stylesheets that use this syntax: @import url(/sta-home/stylesheet/intranet_layout.css), where "sta-home" is the name of the virtual dir. Does anyone have any suggestions/recommendations?

Thanks in advance.

Dan

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Adam Stoller

I'm assuming you use IIS to host your actual web site - yes?
I'm assuming you are talking about static HTML pages and not JSPs or other application server managed pages - yes?

Generally what one does in these situations is creates a "common" branch and uses iwproxy to map references to the desired location - e.g. something like:

[iwproxy_preconnect_remap]
_regex=^/iw-mount/default/main/www/.*(/images/.*\.jpg)=/iw-mount/default/main/common/STAGING/$1

Thus, when previewing a file in TeamSite within the /default/main/www/foo/bar branch, if there is a reference to "/images/mumble.jpg" it would first get resolved as meaing /iw-mount/default/main/www/foo/bar/images/mumble.jpg and then get remaped to /iw-mount/default/main/common/images/mumble.jpg

Having said this, I seem to recall that there were distinctions between include file and include virtual references - so you might need to do something similar under one of the other iwproxy sections of the iw.cfg (e.g. iwproxy_failover_remap)

Of course, I could be completely misunderstanding your question - but hopefully this is the general type of answer you were looking for - it's a lot easier then messing around with IIS configuration options when you wouldn't normally do that for your real web site...

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

dcjung

Hi there, thanks for your reply.

Both your assumptions are correct.

The regex in the iwproxy_preconnect_remap section is exactly what we currently have. This is fine for images and stylesheets, but we have Server Side Includes that require an IIS virtual directory created and defined to the "common branch" in order for them to be resolved in the preview.

What we were concerned with was having too many virtual directories pointed at the Y drive, (since iw-mount already does) and we may have potentially many more "common" branches that need to house includes for other sub sites in this branch. The concern stems mainly from observations that when IIS is restarted, we've noticed it having some binding issues when there are virtual directories pointed at the Y drive. Maybe we should be restarting Teamsite services too, and the order of service restarts could be important too.

To try and workaround this, we moved the common files to a "D Drive" location on the teamsite server and created the virtual dir to point to it there, but based on my testing, the previews that are served up through the "iw-mount" virtual, cannot resolve includes that don't reside on the Y drive. Some of the documentation also seems to support this.

I'll look into the iwproxy failover remap option you suggested.

Thanks again.

Dan
Lead Web Developer
St. Paul Travelers

Dwayne

This is fine for images and stylesheets, but we have Server Side Includes that require an IIS virtual directory

You may have some other requirement that I'm not aware of, but you can most certainly handle SSIs via the proxy, rather than via an IIS virtual directory. You just need to install the ISAPI filter (per instructions in the Admin guide) to get SSIs proxied just like "normal" assets.

--

Current project: TS 5.5.2/6.1 W2K

dcjung

I stand corrected. Evidently my regex for the iwproxy preconnect remap was off. I've modified it and the previews are working now.

Thanks for your feedback!

--Dan