IIS URL rewriting has trouble with subcalls - iis

Question

I have two virtual machines. The first one (VM1) is running a web application with an URL like this:
VM1/servicedesk/customer/user/login
The second (VM2) should now redirect to this address without changing the URL and also doesn't allow to redirect to the root / since that is a different web-application. This works relatively easily with this rewrite rule:
<rule name="rewriteAll" stopProcessing="true">
<match url=".*" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="http://VM1/servicedesk/customer/user/login" />
</rule>
It just basically rewrites everything from VM2 to the specific VM1 URL.
The problem I'm facing is that this web-application has many Ajax calls to other addresses on the same VM1.
For example VM1/rest/... or VM1/s/.... I really tried to find each exceptional call and create a rule before this default Rewrite. But since some of them are nested and could be changed this isn't a good approach. So what i need is basically a rewrite without changing the URL what doesn't break the application that does a lot of nested calls.

Answer 1

I found out that i can use the following rule (redirectRest) before the existing rewriteAll rule to redirect subcalls (VM1/rest/..).
<rule name="redirectRest" stopProcessing="true">
<match url="/.*" />
<action type="Redirect" url="http://VM1/{R:0}" />
</rule>
<rule name="rewriteAll" stopProcessing="true">
<match url=".*" />
<action type="Rewrite" url="http://VM1/servicedesk/customer/user/login" />
</rule>
So basically when I call VM1 the second rule applies and I get rewritten to the web-app. The application hosted there will call e.g. VM1/rest what triggers the first rule and redirect the Ajax calls to the root. But I've found out that Ajax calls are not following a redirect like 301.