Question

I have this route:

{controller}/{id}/{action}

Because I think it makes more sense from RESTful perspective.

The problem is that id can contain slashes (/) and those are treated as route separators even when encoded as “%2F”. Even when I have this Web.config section in place:

<uri>
  <schemeSettings>
    <add name="http" genericUriParserOptions="DontUnescapePathDotsAndSlashes" />
    <add name="https" genericUriParserOptions="DontUnescapePathDotsAndSlashes" />
  </schemeSettings>
</uri>

Because I have id in the middle I can’t employ {*id} approach which captures the rest of the route including the action.

It looks like my only option is to encode / into an RFC compliant character like !, however I do not want to do it using ad-hoc custom code inside controller. I want controller to receive id intact, already decoded. And I want my Url.Action to generate properly encoded URL. Is that too much to ask from MVC, or do I need to scatter ActionFilters and custom URL helpers around?

The only way I could find is to throw in a custom IRouteConstraint to manipulate the RouteValueDictionary it receives. That sounds like a dirty hack though: a constraint manipulating its input. God knows its side effects. Do you think this is a sane enough idea, or is there a better mechanism in ASP.NET MVC allowing that?

EDIT: This workaround only works when parsing the route, not when generating one.

Answer 1

What you are trying to do cannot be done; this has been answered several times on SO – especially of late in relation to RavenDb which uses “/” in the Id field by default (though this can be changed)