ASP.NET MVC Colon in URL

Question

I've seen that IIS has a problem with letting colons into URLs. I also saw the suggestions others offered here.

With the site I'm working on, I want to be able to pass titles of movies, books, etc., into my URL, colon included, like this:

mysite.com/Movie/Bob:The Return

This would be consumed by my MovieController, for example, as a string and used further down the line.

I realize that a colon is not ideal. Does anyone have any other suggestions? As poor as it currently is, I'm doing a find-and-replace from all colons (:) to another character, then a backwards replace when I want to consume it on the Controller end.

Answer 1

I resolved this issue by adding this to my web.config:

<httpRuntime requestPathInvalidCharacters=""/>

This must be within the system.web section.

The default is:

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

So to only make an exception for the colon it would become

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

Read more at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.configuration.httpruntimesection.requestpathinvalidcharacters.aspx

For what I understand the colon character is acceptable as an unencoded character in an URL. I don't know why they added it to the default of the requestPathInvalidCharacters.