Exclude certain pages from using a HTTPModule

Question

Is there a good way to exclude certain pages from using a HTTP module?

I have an application that uses a custom HTTP module to validate a session. The HTTPModule is set up like this in web config:

<system.web>
  <!-- ... -->
  <httpModules>
    <add name="SessionValidationModule"
       type="SessionValidationModule, SomeNamespace" />
  </httpModules>
</system.web>

To exclude the module from the page, I tried doing this (without success):

<location path="ToBeExcluded">
  <system.web>
    <!-- ... -->
    <httpModules>
      <remove name="SessionValidationModule" />
    </httpModules>
  </system.web>
</location>

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

You could use an HTTPHandler instead of an HTTPModule. Handlers let you specify a path when you declare them in Web.Config.

<add verb="*" path="/validate/*.aspx" type="Handler,Assembly"/>

If you must use an HTTPModule, you could just check the path of the request and if it's one to be excluded, bypass the validation.

Answer 2

HttpModules attach to the ASP.NET request processing pipeline itself. The httpModule itself must take care of figuring out which requests it wants to act on and which requests it wants to ignore.

This can f. ex. be achieved by looking at the context.Request.Path property.