Question

I have a bit of a strange problem. I have a controller that is supposed to receive a URL as one of the parameters. I am encoding the URL, and trying to call the controller as such:

http://www.mysite.com/dowork/1/http%3a%2f%2fwww.otherurl.com

However, I am getting the error

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

What gives? Any way to handle this WITHOUT disabling validation?

Answer 1

If that is .NET 4.0, you can edit this configuration setting:

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

If you don’t wish to edit this, you can additionally encode your incoming url – use custom encoding (like replacing dangerous characters) or use base64 encoding or omit protocol part if possible before sending to controller (drop http://, if https:// is possible also, you need to think how to pass that).