Integrated and Classic Pipeline mode

It’s been a very long time since I’ve posted, so here is something I thought was worth writing about seeing there might be some others out there that might find this useful.  These are some experiences I had with Integrated pipeline mode with Sitecore.

We’ve had to switch our pipeline mode in IIS7 to Integrated mode for one of our clients, I found it a little hard to come across a website that gave me a simple answer as to what this was (and in comparison to Classic mode).

Classic pipeline mode is like IIS 6.0 where requests are passed through the IIS pipeline first then the request is handled to aspnet_isapi.dll if the file extension is mapped to ASP.NET ISAPI extension and passes throguh the ASP.NET request pipeline.  It is handled by something else if the file is static or ASP etc.

Integrated pipeline mode has a single pipeline of events where both IIS native code modules and ASP.NET HTTP Modules subscribe to.  After this the file is handled by the appropriate ISAPI extension.

Our client wanted Aliases in Sitecore to work without the “.aspx” extension, switching to Integrated mode allowed this to work.  Integrated mode in Sitecore has a couple of known issues which I read through on SDN and found an interesting article here.  This all seemed a little overwhelming, as during this investigation our client’s website was already live in production.  I had to ensure that this change would not drastically affect any other areas of the website.

After switching the pipeline mode, I came across a problem where images within a virtual directory we had set up on our external slave servers were not downloading.  This was a major issue for us as we had absolutely no idea as to what had caused this.

After raising a support issue with Sitecore, it turned out the <httpModules> and <httpHandlers> sections within <system.web> needed to be commented out.  I learned that all necessary handlers for Integrated mode are handled in <system.webserver> section.

Seems so simple.  However it just so happens we were caught out on this one.  Hopefully this may make others aware of the effects Integrated mode has with their Sitecore solutions.

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