Avoid web.config inheritance in child web application using inheritInChildApplications

As the commenters for the previous answer mentioned, you cannot simply add the line...

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">

...just below <configuration>. Instead, you need to wrap the individual web.config sections for which you want to disable inheritance. For example:

<!-- disable inheritance for the connectionStrings section --><location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">   <connectionStrings>   </connectionStrings></location><!-- leave inheritance enabled for appSettings --><appSettings></appSettings><!-- disable inheritance for the system.web section --><location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">   <system.web>        <webParts>        </webParts>        <membership>        </membership>        <compilation>        </compilation>      </system.web> </location>

While <clear /> may work for some configuration sections, there are some that instead require a <remove name="..."> directive, and still others don't seem to support either. In these situations, it's probably appropriate to set inheritInChildApplications="false".

It needs to go directly under the root <configuration> node and you need to set a path like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?><configuration>    <location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">         <!-- Stuff that shouldn't be inherited goes in here -->    </location></configuration>

A better way to handle configuration inheritance is to use a <clear/> in the child config wherever you don't want to inherit. So if you didn't want to inherit the parent config's connection strings you would do something like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?><configuration>    <connectionStrings>        <clear/>        <!-- Child config's connection strings -->    </connectionStrings></configuration>

I put everything into:

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">....</location>

except: <configSections/>, <connectionStrings/> and <runtime/>.

There are some cases when we don't want to inherit some secions from <configSections />, but we can't put <section/> tag into <location/>, so we have to create a <secionGroup /> and put our unwanted sections into that group. Section groups can be later inserted into a location tag.

So we have to change this:

<configSections>  <section name="unwantedSection" /></configSections>

Into:

<configSections>  <sectionGroup name="myNotInheritedSections">    <section name="unwantedSection" />  </sectionGroup></configSections><location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false">    <myNotInheritedSections>        <unwantedSection />    </myNotInheritedSections></location>