Configuring - General Tab - Forcing Domain and Port

From Visual WebGui Wiki

Overview

This article is a part of articles on Configuring Visual WebGui application General tab

Settings

<WebGui>
   <ForceDomain Value="MyDomain.com" />
   <ForcePort Value="5050" />
   <ForceVirtualDirectory Value="MyVirtualDirectory" />
   <ForceHTTPS Mode="On" Value="None" />
</WebGui>

General

All those Force directives make your application setting the base url of each rendered html page to a certain domain, port or protocol as you desire.

More detail

The IIS is not aware of the proxy server (that is in the way), when responding to the client. As a result, the IIS responds, telling the client to make requests to the port of the IIS server and not the proxy. The Force... settings are used, to force the IIS to tell the client machine to make requests to it using a user-defined URI of the proxy server that we configure using a domain, set by ForceDomain + the virtual directory, set by ForceVirtualDirectory + the port, set by ForcePort. The reason being that the proxy server is actually the one that is externally exposed.

ForceHTTPS Configuration

Before Visual WebGui v6.4 Beta3, the "ForceHTTPS" XML element of the Web.config, only had a "Mode" attribute that allowed either "On" or "Off" as values.
The "ForceHTTPS" element is located inside the "WebGUI" XML section.

In Visual WebGui v6.4 Beta3 we added a "Value" attribute to the "ForceHTTPS" XML element that has three different options: "None", "Redirect" and "Rewrite".

Important notice:
When you wish to use one of those options of the "Value" attribute, you must first remove the "Mode" attribute from the "ForceHTTPS" element, as the "Mode" attribute overrides the "Value" attribute.

These are the meanings of the different values:
- None
The server will not allow use of HTTPS communication and will also provide the client with an HTTP (not HTTPS) URL to send requests with.
- Rewrite
The server will not use HTTPS to communicate with the client but will provide the client with an HTTPS (not HTTP) URI to send requests with.
- Redirect
The server will use HTTPS to communicate with the client and will provide the client with an HTTPS (not HTTP) URI to send requests with.

References

Forum discussions

• Configurable port numbers
• Reverse proxy
• Blank page when clients use proxy server
  
• Redirecting to Https using a second redirecting ASP.NET application
• Definition of what ForceHttps does
• Why reverse-proxy setups may require ForceDomain, ForcePort or ForceVirtualDirectory and how using it affects the rendered Html

Issue Tracker

• VWG-7040 - Extend ForceHTTPS switch

Other references

• Reverse proxy setup on IIS 7.5
• Reverse proxy setup using Apache2