Dots in URL causes 404 with ASP.NET mvc and IIS

Question

I have a project that requires my URLs have dots in the path. For example I may have a URL such as www.example.com/people/michael.phelps

URLs with the dot generate a 404. My routing is fine. If I pass in michaelphelps, without the dot, then everything works. If I add the dot I get a 404 error. The sample site is running on Windows 7 with IIS8 Express. URLScan is not running.

I tried adding the following to my web.config:

<security>
  <requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true"/>
</security>

Unfortunately that didn't make a difference. I just receive a 404.0 Not Found error.

This is a MVC4 project but I don't think that's relevant. My routing works fine and the parameters I expect are there, until they include a dot.

What do I need to configure so I can have dots in my URL?

Answer 1

Tried all the solutions above but none of them worked for me. What did work was I uninstalling .NET versions > 4.5, including all its multilingual versions; Eventually I added newer (English only) versions piece by piece. Right now versions installed on my system is this:

• 2.0
• 3.0
• 3.5 4
• 4.5
• 4.5.1
• 4.5.2
• 4.6
• 4.6.1

And its still working at this point. I'm afraid to install 4.6.2 because it might mess everything up.

So I could only speculate that either 4.6.2 or all those non-English versions were messing up my configuration.

Answer 2

Super easy answer for those that only have this on one webpage. Edit your actionlink and a + "/" on the end of it.

  @Html.ActionLink("Edit", "Edit", new { id = item.name + "/" }) |

Answer 3

You might want to think about using dashes instead of periods.

In Pro ASP MVC 3 Framework they suggest this about making friendly URLs:

Avoid symbols, codes, and character sequences. If you want a word separator, use a dash (/my-great-article). Underscores are unfriendly, and URL-encoded spaces are bizarre (/my+great+article) or disgusting (/my%20great%20article).

It also mentions that URLs should be be easy to read and change for humans. Maybe a reason to think about using a dash instead of a dot also comes from the same book:

Don't use file name extensions for HTML pages (.aspx or .mvc), but do use them for specialized file types (.jpg, .pdf, .zip, etc). Web browsers don't care about file name extensions if you set the MIME type appropriately, but humans still expect PDF files to end with .pdf

So while a period is still readable to humans (though less readable than dashes, IMO), it might still be a bit confusing/misleading depending on what comes after the period. What if someone has a last name of zip? Then the URL will be /John.zip instead of /John-zip, something that can be misleading even to the developer that wrote the application.

Answer 4

Depending on how important it is for you to keep your URI without querystrings, you can also just pass the value with dots as part of the querystring, not the URI.

E.g. www.example.com/people?name=michael.phelps will work, without having to change any settings or anything.

You lose the elegance of having a clean URI, but this solution does not require changing or adding any settings or handlers.

Answer 5

I was able to solve my particular version of this problem (had to make /customer.html route to /customer, trailing slashes not allowed) using the solution at https://stackoverflow.com/a/13082446/1454265, and substituting path="*.html".

Answer 6

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.IO;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;

namespace WebApplication1.Controllers
{
    [RoutePrefix("File")]
    [Route("{action=index}")]
    public class FileController : Controller
    {
        // GET: File
        public ActionResult Index()
        {
            return View();
        }

        [AllowAnonymous]
        [Route("Image/{extension?}/{filename}")]
        public ActionResult Image(string extension, string filename)
        {
            var dir = Server.MapPath("/app_data/images");

            var path = Path.Combine(dir, filename+"."+ (extension!=null?    extension:"jpg"));
           // var extension = filename.Substring(0,filename.LastIndexOf("."));

            return base.File(path, "image/jpeg");
        }
    }
}