ASP.NET MVC Route: bypass staticfile handler for path

Question

I've been googling and tinkering for a couple hours and haven't really made much progress, so hopefully someone here can help.

I'm trying to get all requests to a certain path to be handled by a 3rd party component.

EDIT And I need all requests to all other paths to behave normally.

I'm using a route handler with a wildcard mapping like this:

routes.Add(new Route("pathiwant/{*EverythingElse}", new MyRouteHandler()));

All traditional routes forward correctly to the handler, which forwards nicely to the 3rd party component. When I hit static files (.html, .txt, etc.), they get picked up by the StaticFile handler instead of my handler, so I'm attempting to turn off the StaticFile handler like so (simplified):

<system.webServer>
  <handlers>
    <remove name="StaticFile"/>
  </handlers>
</system.webServer>

This turns off the StaticFile handler, but MVC still doesn't pick up the route.

I'd prefer not to fall back on creating my own handler and injecting into the ASP request stack since it seems like there should be an MVC-happy way to do this.

Any thoughts? And thanks.

Answer 1

There are a couple options here.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BackToBasicsDynamicImageGenerationASPNETControllersRoutingIHttpHandlersAndRunAllManagedModulesForAllRequests.aspx

If you really want all requests running through the asp.net pipe then you need.

<system.webServer>
  <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true" />
</system.webServer>

Update

Another option, especially if your need to bypass the static handler is constrained to a subset of your site, is to use the following

  <add name="ApiURIs-ISAPI-Integrated-4.0"
     path="/subdirectory/*"
     verb="GET,HEAD,POST,DEBUG,PUT,DELETE,PATCH,OPTIONS"
     type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler"
     preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />

Considering how on mvc sites, most static files are handled from a couple well known directories, this is a better option.