Ran into an interesting and esoteric problem today when working with a client. This client had a legacy ASP.NET 2.0 application deployed on IIS6 that used global themes. First, a little background…
A theme is: “a collection of property settings that allow you to define the look of pages and controls, and then apply the look consistently across pages in a Web application, across an entire Web application, or across all Web applications on a server.” Themes commonly include images and CSS files, the latter of which are automatically added to the <head> section of an ASP.NET page that uses said theme. Typically, themes are placed in the App_Theme folder within the web application; however, it is possible to create global themes that can be used across multiple websites on a single web server. When using global themes, the themes are placed in the aspnet_client/system_web/version/Themes folder, located at the webserver’s root (typically C:\Inetpub\wwwroot).
My client had been using IIS6 and global themes. In particular, the theme contained both images and CSS files, along with skins. The CSS files were all located in a subfolder of the theme named styles and the images in a subfolder named images, resulting in a directory structure like so:
MyTheme | |-- images | | | |-- image1.png | |-- image2.png | |-- ... | |-- styles | | | |-- main.css | |-- admin.css | |-- ... | |-- GridView.skin |-- DetailsView.skin |-- ...
When configuring a page to use MyTheme, the page’s rendered markup would automatically include references to the CSS files defined in the MyTheme\styles subfolder (main.css, admin.css, etc.). This worked swimmingly when used as a global theme in IIS6 or when used directly in the App_Themes folder (on both IIS6 and IIS7). However, when my client deployed to IIS7 using global theme structure above the CSS files were not included in the web page. There were no errors when visiting the page, but it clearly wasn’t styled.
After some poking and prodding I decided to try moving the CSS files out of the styles subfolder and into the MyTheme folder (alongside the skin files) and, voila, the CSS files were automatically included in the rendered page’s output. As to why the theme structure above works as a global theme in IIS6, as to why it works when deployed to the App_Themes folder in both IIS6 and IIS7, but as to why it does not work as a global theme is IIS7 is anyone’s guess. The good news is that there is a workaround and it is pretty straightforward.
Happy Programming!
DIGITAL JUICE
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Thank's!