Ampersand in image urls MVC result in A potentially dangerous Request.Path

Question

I have a bunch of images that contain ampersands in their names. My site is built on Asp.net MVC3.

When I try to view the image with they urls below my site returns and error.

Example urls:

1. www.somesite.com/myimages/an-%26-image.jpg
2. www.somesite.com/myimages/an-&-image.jpg

Error returned: A potentially dangerous Request.Path value was detected from the client (&).

Is there away around this issue? I dont really want to turn off validation or revert to requestValidationMode="2.0" as i've seen suggested as this is only an issues with some images.

All the images are in the same folder (myimages), is it possible to stop validation on a particular folder?

Answer 1

I was able to fix this by making the following addition to the Web.config

<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters="&lt;,&gt;,*,%,:,\,?" />

All that was removed was the &. I learned this by narrowing down which parts of this post were required to fix the problem.