Hi everyone,
I'm a non-programmer who has been given the task at work of updating a utility to work with IIS 7.0 that configures IIS read/script/execute permissions on applications and folders within those applications.

I have figured out how to 'grab' a Site, an Application, and also a Virtual Directory.

However, I am still at a loss as to how to grab a Folder (ie. from IIS Manager, you have Default Web Site -> your ApplicationX -> folders inside this application...Data, Images, etc)

I am coding this in VB, although I would take help in pretty much any language :)


Once I can get a hold of the object in a variable, I have no problems setting the permissions. This is a sample of grabbing an application object, and changing its IIS permissions:

Set oWebAdmin = GetObject("winmgmts:root\WebAdministration")
Set oApp = oWebAdmin.Get("Application.SiteName='Default Web Site',Path='MyApplication'")

Call oApp.GetSection("HandlersSection", oHandlersSection)
oHandlersSection.AccessPolicy = 517 (read, execute, script)



If I could just figure out how to get a folder into a variable, I could run the last two lines of code to set individual permissions for that folder.


Does anyone know how to programmatically get a hold of a folder (not a virtual directory) through the WebAdministration interface?


Thanks for your help,
Sam

Do you mean a folder on the file system, like what a virtual folder is mapped to (or a folder under that tree)?

Well, I don't want to mix up terminology, so I will explain it a little better:

In IIS Manager, underneath the Default Web Site node, I have my App, lets call it MyApp.

This app points to c:\MyApp. This directory has folders, so c:\MyApp\Data, c:\MyApp\Plugins, etc.

Back in IIS, the only thing that I created was the application "MyApp", and when I pointed it to c:\MyApp, it automatically filled in all of the folder/file structure inside of it. So when I expand the app MyApp in IISManager, I see a bunch of plain folder icons.

It is those folders that I want to modify the read/execute/script permissions on. Lets say for example I want to set MyApp to be read only, but I need the Plugins folder to also allow Scripts/Execute.


So basically I want to modify a file system folder, but modify the IIS related permissions of it, which I can do easily through the IIS Manager UI (with the Handler Mappings feature). There should not be any Virtual Directory creation in the entire process, as far as I can tell.

Does that help?

Yeah. Unfortunately it's more complex than setting the NTFS permissions. Read/Execute/Script is something only IIS knows about.

Does 7 still keep all its site data in XML?

Now all configuration data is stored in web.config files for nodes from the Site level down (ie. site, app, vdir/folder)

Top level settings that affect all IIS are stored in a similar file, ApplicationHost.config


And I actually already figured out how to change read/execute/script permissions, basically using a "HandlersSection" object, which coresponds to the handler section of the web.config files, which has a property "AccessPolicy" which you can set to any combination of Read/Write/Execute/Script/etc.

I have a problem finding perhaps an even simpler answer, I know how to set the IIS permissions for an object once I have the object in a variable...I just can't figure out how to get a Folder level in a variable.


I *believe* there is a difference between a true Virtual Directory, and just a folder that shows up in IIS Manager underneath an IIS Application. At least graphically, they have two different icons.

Programmatically, I can grab a VirtualDirectory easily, there is a class VirtualDirectory (just like there is a class Site and Application and ApplicationPool). My problem is that I can't figure out what the object for a Folder (non-VDir) is, or how to access it.

Using the UI I can set these permissions on just a standard run of the mill folder, and a web.config file shows up inside its contents - just like you can do with a Virtual Directory. I just need to access the folder in code.

Hope that clarifies it? Thanks for the assistance so far as well!
Sam

I don't think the folders you're looking for are "stored in" or managed by IIS. A virtual directory points to a node in a file system, and then IIS deals with whatever is there while it's running, in memory. Somebody requests a file, the web server looks for it, and returns a 404 if it's not there.

That said, you might find something interesting in the IIS metabase.xml, stored in or under C:\WINDOWS\system32\inetsrv.

Are you trying to do this in code using .net, are you using ADSI, or...?