In asp.net-mvc, would a querystring too long result in 404 File not found error?

Question

I have an asp.net-mvc site and I have a case where I have a very long querystring in a URL. This was previously not an issue but I am suddenly getting this error in a few cases:

404-File or director not found - the resource you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.

I haven't proven that its due to url length but the reason I am assuming that this is related to length of querystring is that if I selected remove certain parts of the query string it works fine and I have gone through each section (to identify of part of the query string is "corrupt"

I am able to reproduce this error in my example that has a total url length of 2805 characters. Is this expected? I see the issue in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The reason I ask is that from my googling, it seems like IIS throws a different error when querystring is too long (415 or 414 error as described here)

Is this something that is set on the server side? in the web.config?

Answer 1

<system.webServer>
  <security>
    <requestFiltering>
      <requestLimits maxQueryString="xxxx"/>
    </requestFiltering>
  </security>
</system.webServer>

See

http://www.iis.net/ConfigReference/system.webServer/security/requestFiltering/requestLimits

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/e1f13641(v=vs.100).aspx

Answer 2

Per MSDN:

When request filtering blocks an HTTP request because an HTTP request exceeds the request limits, IIS 7 will return an HTTP 404 error to the client and log one of the following HTTP statuses with a unique substatus that identifies the reason that the request was denied:

| HTTP    | Substatus Description     | 
|---------|---------------------------|
|  404.13 | Content Length Too Large  |
|  404.14 | URL Too Long              |
|  404.15 | Query String Too Long     | 

FYI - 2048 is generally considered the highest cross-browser limit for a URL length.