Why does the IIS ServerManager class create my handler mapping disabled?

Question

I want to add a handler mapping (script map) for our custom CGI-Exe to an Internet Information Server using the classes in the Microsoft.Web.Administration namespace. The (simplified) code is:

var serverManager = ServerManager.OpenRemote(serverName);

Configuration webConfig = serverManager.GetWebConfiguration(siteName, appPath);
ConfigurationSection handlersSection = webConfig.GetSection("system.webServer/handlers");

ConfigurationElementCollection handlersCollection = handlersSection.GetCollection();
string elementName = cgiFile + " script map appHost added by ACM";
ConfigurationElement addElement = handlersCollection.CreateElement("add");
addElement["allowPathInfo"] = true;
addElement["modules"] = "CgiModule";
addElement["name"] = elementName;
addElement["path"] = cgiFile;
addElement["requireAccess"] = "Execute";
addElement["scriptProcessor"] = Path.Combine(scriptsPath, cgiFile);
addElement["verb"] = "*";

handlersCollection.Add(addElement);
serverManager.CommitChanges();

This code adds the handler mapping to the mapping list in the IIS, but it is marked as disabled:

I have to manually select “Edit Feature Permissions…” from the Actions pane and select the “Execute” permission in the following dialog:

I want to know how to enable the handler mapping, either by setting different configuration options while creating the handler or by programmatically editing the feature permissions.

Update

I copied the web.config that was created as a result of this script, then I manually added the Execute permission with the dialog above and compared the resulting web.config to the original one:

The start changed from:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <handlers>

to

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <handlers accessPolicy="Read, Execute, Script">

Now I need to find out, how to set the accessPolicy. But why is this set on the handlers node and not on my specific handler node?

Answer 1

Sometimes it helps just to formulate the question on stackoverflow. After playing with this for two days, I found the solution just hours after posting the question:

I needed to set the accessPolicy for the handlers.

After adding this line it finally worked:

handlersSection["accessPolicy"] = "Read, Script, Execute";

It seems I just used the wrong search terms, I looked for "edit feature permissions" instead of accessPolicy.