Avoid web config inheritance in child web application using inheritInChildApplications

Question

I am trying to add   lt location inheritInChildApplications  false  gt    to my parent web application s web config but it doesn t seem to be working   My parent s web config has    lt configuration gt       lt configSections gt       lt  configSections gt          10 or so custom config sections like log4net  hibernate        lt connectionStrings gt       lt  connectionStrings gt        lt appSettings gt       lt  appSettings gt        lt system diagnostics gt       lt  system diagnostics gt        lt system web gt            lt webParts gt            lt  webParts gt            lt membership gt            lt  membership gt             lt compilation gt            lt  compilation gt       lt  system web gt        lt location    gt       lt system web gt           lt  system web gt       lt  location gt        lt system webServer gt       lt  system webServer gt    My child web application is setup as an application in IIS  and is inheriting from the parent s web config which is causing problems   Where exactly should I place the   lt location inheritInChildApplications  false  gt    so it ignores all the various web config settings

User · Accepted Answer

As the commenters for the previous answer mentioned, you cannot simply add the line...

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">

...just below <configuration>. Instead, you need to wrap the individual web.config sections for which you want to disable inheritance. For example:

<!-- disable inheritance for the connectionStrings section -->
<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
   <connectionStrings>
   </connectionStrings>
</location>

<!-- leave inheritance enabled for appSettings -->
<appSettings>
</appSettings>

<!-- disable inheritance for the system.web section -->
<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">
   <system.web>
        <webParts>
        </webParts>
        <membership>
        </membership>

        <compilation>
        </compilation>
      </system.web>
 </location>

While <clear /> may work for some configuration sections, there are some that instead require a <remove name="..."> directive, and still others don't seem to support either. In these situations, it's probably appropriate to set inheritInChildApplications="false".

User · Answer

We were getting an error related to this after a recent release of code to one of our development environments   We have an application that is a child of another application   This relationship has been working fine for YEARS until yesterday   The problem   We were getting a yellow stack trace error due to duplicate keys being entered   This is because both the web config for the child and parent applications had this key   But this existed for many years like this without change   Why all of sudden its an issue now   The solution   The reason this was never a problem is because the keys AND values were always the same   Yesterday we updated our SQL connection strings to include the Application Name in the connection string   This made the string unique and all of sudden started to fail   Without doing any research on the exact reason for this  I have to assume that when the child application inherits the parents web config values  it ignores identical key value pairs   We were able to solve it by wrapping the connection string like this        lt location path     inheritInChildApplications  false  gt           lt connectionStrings gt               lt  -- Updated connection strings go here -- gt           lt  connectionStrings gt       lt  location gt    Edit   I forgot to mention that I added this in the PARENTS web config   I didn t have to modify the child s web config   Thanks for everyones help on this  saved our butts

User · Answer

If  as I understand  you re trying to completely block inheritance in the web config of your child application  I suggest you to avoid using the  tag in web config  Instead create a new apppool and edit the applicationHost config file  located in  WINDIR  System32 inetsrv Config and  WINDIR  SysWOW64 inetsrv config   You just have to find the entry for your apppool and add the attribute enableConfigurationOverride  false  like in the following example    lt add name  MyAppPool  autoStart  true  managedRuntimeVersion  v4 0  managedPipelineMode  Integrated  enableConfigurationOverride  false  gt       lt processModel identityType  NetworkService    gt   lt  add gt    This will avoid configuration inheritance in the applications served by MyAppPool   Matteo

User · Answer

It needs to go directly under the root  lt configuration gt  node and you need to set a path like this    lt  xml version  1 0   gt   lt configuration gt       lt location path     inheritInChildApplications  false  gt            lt  -- Stuff that shouldn t be inherited goes in here -- gt       lt  location gt   lt  configuration gt    A better way to handle configuration inheritance is to use a  lt clear  gt  in the child config wherever you don t want to inherit   So if you didn t want to inherit the parent config s connection strings you would do something like this    lt  xml version  1 0   gt   lt configuration gt       lt connectionStrings gt           lt clear  gt           lt  -- Child config s connection strings -- gt       lt  connectionStrings gt   lt  configuration gt

User · Answer

We re getting errors about duplicate configuration directives on the one of our apps   After investigation it looks like it s because of this issue   In brief  our root website is ASP NET 3 5  which is 2 0 with specific libraries added   and we have a subapplication that is ASP NET 4 0   web config inheritance causes the ASP NET 4 0 sub-application to inherit the web config file of the parent ASP NET 3 5 application   However  the ASP NET 4 0 application s global  or  root   web config  which resides at C  Windows Microsoft NET Framework v4 0 30319 Config web config and C  Windows Microsoft NET Framework64 v4 0 30319 Config web config  depending on your bitness   already contains these config sections   The ASP NET 4 0 app then tries to merge together the root ASP NET 4 0 web config  and the parent web config  the one for an ASP NET 3 5 app   and runs into duplicates in the  node   The only solution I ve been able to find is to remove the config sections from the parent web config  and then either   Determine that you didn t need them in your root application  or if you do Upgrade the parent app to ASP NET 4 0  so it gains access to the root web config s configSections

User · Answer

I put everything into    lt location path     inheritInChildApplications  false  gt        lt  location gt    except   lt configSections  gt    lt connectionStrings  gt  and  lt runtime  gt    There are some cases when we don t want to inherit some secions from  lt configSections   gt   but we can t put  lt section  gt  tag into  lt location  gt   so we have to create a  lt secionGroup   gt  and put our unwanted sections into that group  Section groups can be later inserted into a location tag   So we have to change this    lt configSections gt     lt section name  unwantedSection    gt   lt  configSections gt    Into    lt configSections gt     lt sectionGroup name  myNotInheritedSections  gt       lt section name  unwantedSection    gt     lt  sectionGroup gt   lt  configSections gt    lt location path     inheritInChildApplications  false  gt       lt myNotInheritedSections gt           lt unwantedSection   gt       lt  myNotInheritedSections gt   lt  location gt

User · Answer

This is microsoft s page on the location tag   http   msdn microsoft com en-us library b6x6shw7 28v vs 100 29 aspx  It may be helpful to some folks

[asp.net] Avoid web.config inheritance in child web application using inheritInChildApplications

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