MVC routes with special characters

Question

I'm trying to support some legacy urls, and map them to controller actions. The URLs look like this:

/~Home+Office~Note+Pads.html

Here's my route:

routes.MapRoute(
    "LegacyCategory",
    "{path}.html",
    new { controller = "LegacyCI", action = "Index", }
);

Here's the (beginnings of) my controller to deal with them:

public class LegacyCIController : Controller {
    public ActionResult Index(string path) {
        if (path == "~Address+Labels") {
            return RedirectToAction("Display", "Category", new { id = "AddressLabels" });
        }       
        return RedirectToAction("Index", "Category"); 
    }
}

If I set a breakpoint in LegacyCIController, and I set my start page to XXX.html, the breakpoint hits (and fails the if) and life is good. But when I try to set the start page to ~Address+Labels.html, no breakpoint is hit, and Chrome just pukes and shows me a page that says "oops, this page appears to be broken".

I'm running this page through IIS 7 on my machine, not Visual Studio.

Is this URL so malformed that a regular MVC route can't even handle it, or am I doing something else wrong?

Answer 1

By default IIS7 blocks URLs (error 404.11) with a + in the path, you can override this by turning on allowDoubleEscaping in web.config:

  <system.webServer>
    <security>
      <requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true">
      </requestFiltering>
    </security>
  </system.webServer>

However, as explained on the IIS blog this option opens a potential security hole, so be a little careful while using it:

http://blogs.iis.net/thomad/archive/2007/12/17/iis7-rejecting-urls-containing.aspx