IIS7 - Publishing

Re: WebDav and Forms Authorization in IIS7

WebDAV — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 14:13:40 GMT

To save Microsoft Office document that was opened from hyperlink back to server you mast set OpenDocumentsReadWriteWhileBrowsing value in registry:

http://www.webdavsystem.com/server/documentation/hyperlinked_ms_office_docs

Note that your server must support Class 2

Forms authorization does not work with WebDAV. I have heard some users managed to implement mixed basic challenge - response authorization and forms authorization. But it was quite a complex task.

Re: WebDav and Forms Authorization in IIS7

anilr — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:28:44 GMT

It is possible that if office is already authenticated with the correct credentials, it may use the same when doing the webdav requests - I haven't tested it, you may have to test and see - but, definitely the case where it needs to authenticate when making the webdav request will not work as getting redirect to the forms login page as response to webdav request will probably not be handled by office.

Re: WebDav and Forms Authorization in IIS7

rmmason — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:23:33 GMT

Thanks for the reply.

MS Office would be the client in this instance. I was hoping that by opening the document from a link from in a website working on the same url as the WebDav server where the user is already logged on using forms authorisation that office would also use the same session but it makes sense that this is not the case.

Could you confirm that this is not the case? Also can you think of any solution to my problem of being able to deliver a word document to the client machine and allow the user to save it back to the server using the standard save button in office?

I know this is possible in Sharepoint but we need similar functionality without using Sharepoint and need to ensure the user is authenticated.

Re: WebDav and Forms Authorization in IIS7

anilr — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:07:57 GMT

By default, no managed modules are run for webdav requests - this is because of the fact that you can upload managed modules to bin/app_code directories or global.asax using webdav and if any of those uploads breaks your site, webdav would also be broken if that code ran on webdav requests also. You can change this behavior by setting runManagedModulesForWebDavRequests attribute to true in the system.webServer/modules section.

That is about the server side - on the client side, I am not aware of any webdav client which supports forms auth - and sending a form to authenticate for webdav may be against webdav protocol. XP webdav redirector does have certain limitations regarding not being able to map root of a website etc. Robert should be able to fill in on more.

WebDav and Forms Authorization in IIS7

rmmason — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 23:05:46 GMT

Could anyone let me know if webdav supports forms authorization. Essentially I am interested in using the in-built support for WebDav in MS Office to allow users of a system we are proposing to edit word documents.

My concerns are that WebDav may not support forms authorization although everything I have read about the new features of IIS7 lead me to believe that this should work at the moment.

I am also a little concerned about the fact that I think I have read that WebDav on IIS7 does not support the locking of files and this may lead to user overwriting the changes of another user. Does anyone know of an acceptable solution to this? I was wondering if you could get at the WebDav request using the IIS pipeline before it reaches WebDav and implement some custom file locking routine at that point?

I have also heard that WebDav support in XP is a little bit flaky. Is this something I should be concerned about or in the simple scenario outlined above should I be OK.

Many thanks for any help or suggestions in advance.