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

I believe you have to set the property relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping in your web.config. Haack wrote an article about this a little while ago (and there are some other SO posts asking the same types of question)

<system.web>
<httpRuntime relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping="true" />

Answer 2

As solution could be also considering encoding to a format which doesn't contain symbol., as base64.

In js should be added

btoa(parameter); 

In controller

byte[] bytes = Convert.FromBase64String(parameter);
string parameter= Encoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);

Answer 3

After some poking around I found that relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping did not work at all for me, what worked in my case was setting RAMMFAR to true, the same is valid for (.net 4.0 + mvc3) and (.net 4.5 + mvc4).

<system.webserver>
    <modules runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests="true">

Be aware when setting RAMMFAR true Hanselman post about RAMMFAR and performance

Answer 4

I got stuck on this issue for a long time following all the different remedies without avail.

I noticed that when adding a forward slash [/] to the end of the URL containing the dots [.], it did not throw a 404 error and it actually worked.

I finally solved the issue using a URL rewriter like IIS URL Rewrite to watch for a particular pattern and append the training slash.

My URL looks like this: /Contact/~firstname.lastname so my pattern is simply: /Contact/~(.*[^/])$

I got this idea from Scott Forsyth, see link below: http://weblogs.asp.net/owscott/handing-mvc-paths-with-dots-in-the-path

Answer 5

Also, (related) check the order of your handler mappings. We had a .ashx with a .svc (e.g. /foo.asmx/bar.svc/path) in the path after it. The .svc mapping was first so 404 for the .svc path which matched before the .asmx. Havn't thought too much but maybe url encodeing the path would take care of this.