don't know how this virtual directory structure was setup on iis6

Question

Our development server has a setup as follows:

\\DEVSRVR\WEBSITES\COMMON
└───include

Here is where all css and script files resides. They are required by various web applications

\\DEVSRVR\WEBSITES\TESTING\SAM
├───Backup
│   └───bin
├───bin
└───help

Here is where an application resides. Suppose there is an aspx page under the folder called SAM, we'd normally issue an http request as follows:

http://testing.apps/sam/default.aspx

We believe that testing.apps virtual name points to \\\\devsrvr\websites\testing folder.

Suppose there is a css file called menu.css inside common/include. We'd simply have to make the following http call to get it:

http://testing.apps/common/include/menu3.css

This works!!! I don't understand how? There is no such folder called common inside of testing...

Answer 1

IIS does not require the web site's directory structure to match the on-disk directory structure.

It's possible you have a website configured bound to the testing.apps hostname which maps to \\devsrvr\websites\testing, then inside the /sam path you have a virtual directory pointing to \\devsrvr\websites\common.

(note that the IIS server probably uses local paths like "C:\inetpub\wwwroot\common" rather than UNC paths)