Question

One problem I have been facing off and on for the past few weeks was trying to search SharePoint for a list item value and kept getting bad request error. I had two symbols causing problems, one was that I could not search for something with anh & symbol, and the other was a / (forward slash).

My code looked like:

ServiceContext context = new ServiceContext(new Uri("http://URL/_vti_bin/listdata.svc"));
    context.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
    var requestType = (System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceQuery<ListTypeValue>)context.ListType
        .Where(v => v.Value.Equals(search));

After searching the internet, nothing valid came back besides saying change IIS settings, or convert it to ASCII Html value (NOTE: converting & to %27 still causes bad request error).

Answer 1

I found this article and it gave me an idea. I was going to try and use HEX, but since I am using a web service, I couldn’t figure anything out. Finally I thought, hey, someone stated how they used substringof, why not try startswith!

Finally! A solution to this problem.

INVALID:
http://URL/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/ListType('Search & Stuff')

VALID:
http://URL/_vti_bin/listdata.svc/ListType() $filter=startswith(Value,'Search & Stuff')

I took it a step further since this could potentially return not what I wanted. I added length is equal to the strings length and it is working perfectly!

My C# Code looks like this now:

ServiceContext context = new ServiceContext(new Uri("http://URL/_vti_bin/listdata.svc"));
context.Credentials = CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
var requestType = (System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceQuery<ListTypeValue>)context.ListType
    .Where(v => v.Value.StartsWith(search) && v.Value.Length == search.Length);

Hopefully this helps someone else out and saves some hair pulling!

---

UPDATE:

After getting replies from people, I found a better way to do this. Instead of the standard LINQ method of querying, there is another option. See MSDN Article

System.Data.Services.Client.DataServiceQuery<ListTypeValue> lobtest = context.ListType
    .AddQueryOption("$filter", "(Value eq '" + CleanString(search) + "')");

Now I will implement link posted from Mark Stafford and parse out reserved characters.