Setting up authorization behavior

[Scott Simes]

Hello:

I have what I thought was a simple requirement, but I've not been able to
figure out a solution yet.

I am using Forms authentication. If someone navigates to my web address,
say, [url]www.foo.com[/url] (fictitious), I want them to see an aspx page, such as
index.aspx. The problem is that I have to use this

<authorization>
<deny users="?" />
</authorization>

XML in my web.config file. If I do not, then the redirect feature will not
work. (The redirect feature I'm referring to is the Forms tag's loginUrl
attribute. This URL causes a redirect to automatically occur if a user hits
a page that requires authentication. It is suppsed to also create a
querystring value that holds a reference to the page the user originally
navigated to so that it can return (redirect) to that page after successful
authentication.) If I do not deny users as above then this redirect with
querystring doesn't work. I get redirected to the login page, but no
querystring value appears.

So, this means that all pages in the root require authentication. So I have
created a folder under the root called "noauth" and have placed pages there.
That folder has its own web.config file, and it specifies this:

<authorization>
<allow users="?" />
</authorization>

This works.

However, I have to redirect all users who hit [url]www.foo.com[/url] to a sub-folder,
and this just seems strange.

Is there a way to allow free (no-authorization) access to root pages and
also have the redirect-with-querystring feature work?

Thank you for any help.

[David Coe]

Scott

Yes, there is a way to allow all users free access to some items, and authorized access to other items. In your web.config file, just above or below the <system.web> element, you will input the following

<location path="mypage.aspx"><system.web><authorization><all ow users="?" /></authorization></system.web></location

You can set that configuration for each of the items that you want to allow all unknown/unauthenticated users to be able to see.