An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - Feature Delegation

In this article, we will look into one of the feature of IIS 7.5 that helps IIS administrator configure the delegation state of features, such as Compression, CGI etc that are configurable in Web.config files at the site and application levels in IIS Manager. By using this feature, we can delegate configuration of certain features to a site owner so that he can configure those delegated features at his site level.

You can see my previous articles on IIS 7.5 Feature:

• An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - Server Certificates
• An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - Compression
• An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - WebDAV
• An Overview of IIS 7.5 feature - Request Filtering
• An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - Failed Request Event Buffering
• An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - IP & Domain Restrictions
• An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - HTTP Redirect
  
• An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - Logging

This feature is helpful in shared IIS environment, where we might be hosting multiple web sites of different clients. We can restrict users from overriding features set at server level in site level.

Let’s open IIS 7.5 manager and check whether Feature Delegation Module present or not under Management section as shown below:



Let’s select server node, double-click on Feature Delegation and understand its settings:



Click on Compression feature and understand its settings:



We can set a feature delegation as:

Read Only:

The configuration is locked and any change of the feature in a Web.config file will cause a runtime error. It will be visible but locked to restrict changes to it in IIS Manager, when a user is connected at lower levels.

Read/Write: The feature can be configured in Web.config by users, who are connected at lower levels [site or application level].

Not Delegated:

The configuration is locked and any change of the feature in a Web.config file will cause a runtime error and cannot see the feature by users, who are connected at lower levels [site or application level].

We can click on “Custom Site Delegation” to configure delegation state to specific web site instead of all web sites by selecting it from Sites drop down. We can even copy custom delegation state of all features from one site to another site by clicking on “Copy Delegation”.



We can create non-Windows users and set their permissions at IIS level and allow them to configure delegated features at site or application level using below features under Management section:



I am ending the things here on Feature Delegation, I hope this article will be helpful for all.

Read more articles on IIS:

• An Overview Of IIS 7.5 Feature - WebDAV
• Hosting ASP.NET Website On IIS