Adding simple custom schema to IIS Configuration

davcox — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:27:00 GMT

Let's see if I can get 2 blog posts written in the same month! :)

As I was talking last post, our team had an app-building week (everyone will see the results over the next couple months; there were some VERY cool tools that I'm excited for people to see). I wanted to document part of my journey on getting a custom schema added.

One thing that I noted is that it's important to make sure your schema file is well-formed XML, or all sorts of tools will choke in various ways.

I looked at the existing iis_schema.xml for examples of various elements that I could use. Also, this IIS.net article is extremely helpful in getting started: http://www.iis.net/articles/view.aspx/IIS7/Extending-IIS7/Extending-IIS7-Configuration/Extending-IIS7-Schema-and-Accessing-the-custom-sec

I ended up creating this schema:

I wanted to automate adding my custom Section to the IIS config system, so I saw that MVolo has a tool to do just that; it works great. It's really just adding one line to applicationhost.config, but it's easier said than automated.

The line that needs to be added to the <configSections> element is:

Here is the iisschema.exe tool which will let you add this line item automatically.

http://mvolo.com/blogs/serverside/archive/2007/08/04/IISSCHEMA.EXE-_2D00_-A-tool-to-register-IIS7-configuration-sections.aspx
http://www.harbar.net/archive/2007/08/08/IISSCHEMA.EXE--A-tool-to-register-IIS7-configuration-sections.aspx

At this point, I could read and write configuration through tools like appcmd and the rest of the configuration stack (including the UI Configuration Editor module).

The next post will be how to develop a managed module that runs in the IIS pipeline.

Dave's Blog : Schema

Adding simple custom schema to IIS Configuration