Who is this article for?

Ideagen Smartforms users configuring the system.

Understanding of Windows server is required.

While attempting to access your Data Replication Server ( by default http://[servername]/DRS ), you might receive a response of:

HTTP 403 (Forbidden)

If this occurs, it may have been caused by IIS configured to support the WebDAV protocol. The Data Replication Server web app relies on RESTful service calls (PUT, DELETE, etc) which are being handled by WebDAV instead of the Data Replication Server web app. 

To resolve this, either disable WebDAV completely for IIS or disable WebDAV for the Data Replication Server web app. This requires a slight change to the web.config file of the Data Replication Server web app. By default, the location is: 

c:\inetpub\wwwroot\DRS\web.config.

edit the web.config file by editing the <system.webServer> section.

The eventual<system.webServer>section might look something like this:

<system.webServer>
 <httpErrors existingResponse="PassThrough" errorMode="Detailed" />
 <handlers>
 <remove name="WebDAV"/>
 <remove name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" />
 <remove name="OPTIONSVerbHandler" />
 <remove name="TRACEVerbHandler" />
 <add name="ExtensionlessUrlHandler-Integrated-4.0" path="*." verb="*" type="System.Web.Handlers.TransferRequestHandler" preCondition="integratedMode,runtimeVersionv4.0" />
 </handlers>
<modules>
<remove name="WebDAVModule"/>
</modules>
 ...
</system.webServer>

If attempting to access the Data Replication server by browser url ("http://[servername]/DRS"), you may also received the 403 Forbidden error if the root folder does not contain a default file. To resolve this, add a blank "default.aspx" file to the c:\inetpub\wwwroot\DRS\ folder.

Access the Data Replication Server again and the 403 error should not reappear.