A potentially dangerous Request.Path value was det

Question

I am receiving the rather self explanatory error:

A potentially dangerous Request.Path value was detected from the client (*).

The issue is due to * in the request URL:

https://stackoverflow.com/Search/test*/0/1/10/1

This url is used to populate a search page where 'test*' is the search term and the rest of the url relates to various other filters.

Is there an easy way to allow these special characters in the URL? I've tried modifying the web.config, to no avail.

Should I manually encode / decode the special characters? Or is there a best practice for doing this, I would like to avoid using query strings. - but it may be an option.

The application itself is a c# asp.net webforms application that uses routing to produce the nice URL above.

Answer 1

For me, I am working on .net 4.5.2 with web api 2.0, I have the same error, i set it just by adding requestPathInvalidCharacters="" in the requestPathInvalidCharacters you have to set not allowed characters else you have to remove characters that cause this problem.

<system.web>
     <httpRuntime targetFramework="4.5.2" requestPathInvalidCharacters="" />
     <pages  >
      <namespaces>
     ....
 </namespaces>
    </pages> 
  </system.web>

**Note that it is not a good practice, may be a post with this parameter as attribute of an object is better or try to encode the special character. -- After searching on best practice for designing rest api, i found that in search, sort and paginnation, we have to handle the query parameter like this

/companies?search=Digital%26Mckinsey

and this solve the problem when we encode & and remplace it on the url by %26 any way, on the server we receive the correct parameter Digital&Mckinsey

this link may help on best practice of designing rest web api https://hackernoon.com/restful-api-designing-guidelines-the-best-practices-60e1d954e7c9