Prevent URL Rewrite rules from being inherited by subdirectories in IIS7

I have a URL Rewrite setup for clean URLs in a CMS and my web.config looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="Clean URLs" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^([^/]+)/?$" />
                    <conditions>
                        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" />
                        <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" />
                    </conditions>
                    <action type="Rewrite" url="?id={R:1}" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

It basically turns index.php?id=something into something for clean URLs. Very simple and it works well.

As is common in CMSs, to prevent the back-end from breaking, each subdirectory requires either <remove name="Clean URLs" /> or <clear /> in its web.config so the rule isn't inherited.

Is there a way of specifying in the parent rule that it shouldn't be inherited by its children at all by somehow limiting the rule's scope to only the current directory? Something like <rule name="Clean URLs" stopProcessing="true" inherit="no"> would be epic.

Solution 1:

Found the answer after 4.5 hours of Googling!

http://runtingsproper.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/solved-breaking-parent-webconfig.html

Basically taking advantage of

<location path="." inheritInChildApplications="false"> 
    <system.webServer>
        <!-- ... -->
    </system.webServer>
</location>

Solution 2:

I recently ran into this problem, in a similar situation. But the answer from rjenkins would seem to cause problems with virtual applications that relied on inheritance of parent settings.

If you know the name of the rewrite rule you can just do this:

<rewrite>
  <rules>
    <remove name="RewriteNameToDisable" />
  </rules>
</rewrite>