App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

Marinautics » Blog Archive » App_Offline.htm and Visual Studio 2008

Marinautics » Blog Archive » App_Offline.htm and Visual Studio 2008 — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 10:07:44 GMT

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re: App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

Samiq — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 17:24:08 GMT

Ping back from samiqbits.blogspot.com

Found this morning in my daily RSS reading a post in the ASP.NET Daily Articles that shows how to bring an application down for maintenance or upgrade without even getting to open IIS and stop the service.

re: App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

Ram — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 16:09:21 GMT

I have a query similar to this scenario. Is there anyway that we can go for offline mode in Web Application? So the users will not be connected to the network all the time, when they get the connection they shud be able to upload the data.

ASP.NET 2.0 Tips, Tricks, Recipes and Gotchas

ScottGu's Blog — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 15:55:24 GMT

This page lists some of the more popular &ldquo;ASP.NET 2.0 Tips, Tricks, Recipes and Gotchas&rdquo;

re: App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

ScottGu — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 01:40:12 GMT

Hi Adam,

The behavior you are seeing it because IIS is handling the request instead of ASP.NET (since it couldn't find any default document to execute).

One way to have it map to the app_offline.htm file in these cases would be to setup an IIS custom error handler to go to this file (instead of showing the default error).

Hope this helps,

Scott

re: App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

Adam Toth — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 15:56:34 GMT

A little late here, but I noticed an issue with IIS and the app_offline page. When I am in the process of publishing a website, app_offline works well until the default document gets deleted. If I try to access the root (e.g. http://mydomain/myapp) and default.aspx is defined as the default document and it gets deleted, then that request returns the typical error that you see when no default document is found. Is there any way around this so the app_offline.htm page is shown, even when the default document doesn't exist?

re: App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

ScottGu — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 05:13:05 GMT

Thanks Rick! ;-)

The reason you can't actually use a .axd approach is that this would require code to run *in* the application in order to enable it. This works for some scenarios -- but in cases where you want to be able to update the application's configuration and \bin assemblies you might have cases where the app won't boot/run -- in which case you the .axd approach doesn't work. That is why we support the .htm file option - since you can use it to shut-down the app without requiring any managed code to run.

ASP.NET does provide the hooks so that you can disable applications from running - so if you wanted to implement a control panel that runs *outside* of the application and supports toggling apps you can.

But we wanted to have a nice, built-in option that people could use without requiring their hosters to-do work to wire this up. That is why we added the app_offline.htm option as well.

Hope this helps,

Scott

re: App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

Rick Strahl — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 03:01:10 GMT

I think this is a lame feature. Well, no the idea is right but the execution is lame <g>. Seriously - copying a file to take an application offline?

This should be a built in function that toggles the site between online and offline mode. An AXD page that requires a login of some sort. Better yet there should be some eventing available for this so that you could check who's coming into the site and potentially allow authenticated (or whatever user you use to filter) access.

I tend to build this sort of thing into my framework where there's a check for a static flag that gets toggled. In addition there's a static message that can be customized in the Web UI that lets you vary the message. That makes a heck of a lot more sense than having to transfer a file to a live a Web Site and then remove it again.

My mechanism does mean that some code still needs to run which can be a problem in some update scenarios but if this were internally supported in ASP.NET that could probably be avoided altogether.

re: App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

ScottGu — Sun, 04 Jun 2006 20:03:37 GMT

Hi Ogre,

Unfortunately I don't think there is a way to override the default app_offline.htm file that VS uses. Sorry!

Scott

re: App_Offline.htm and working around the "IE Friendly Errors" feature

Ogre — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 13:22:45 GMT

FTP can be unreliable. I've seen the app_offline.htm file not get deleted after copying the website due to a less than pristine connection.

Is there a place in a web project where you can put a customized app_offline.htm file and have VS copy that file instead of the one it auto-generates?