Question

Running IIS6.
So, ‘.’ do not work in IIS6, but they work fine in the visual studio debugger and IIS7. Here’s the steps to reproduce.

Steps to reproduce:
– Start with a blank MVC 3 project.
– Add A new view called “Index” and accept the defaults.
– Configure RegisterRoutes() as follows:

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
    routes.IgnoreRoute("{resource}.axd/{*pathInfo}");

    routes.MapRoute(
        "QuerySomething",
        "QueryStuff/Index/{*aString}",
        new { controller = "QueryStuff", action = "Index", aString = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
    );

    routes.MapRoute(
        "Default", // Route name
        "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters
        new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults
    );

}

Now, add a controller that returns Json:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Mvc;

    namespace MvcApplication1.Controllers
    {
        public class QueryStuffController : Controller
        {
            //
            // GET: /QueryStuff/

            public ActionResult Index(string aString)
            {
                return Json("aString:oye",JsonRequestBehavior.AllowGet);
            }

        }
    }

1. Verify that the page is accessible:

   http://serverName/QueryStuff/Index/someInfo

You should get http 200.

1. Now try to get there with a ‘.’ in the path

   http://serverName/QueryStuff/Index/someInfo.com

You should get a http 404 error. (Note that this error is NOT reproduceable when running through visual studio debugger. One must deploy the code to IIS.)

UPDATE
I modified Regex to route for email addresses and it made the problem even worse.

    routes.MapRoute(
        "QuerySomething",
        "QueryStuff/Index/{aString}"
        , new { controller = "QuerySomething", action = "Index" },
        new { aString = @"\b[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b" }
        ); 

With this its 404 everytime.

Answer 1

I don’t think this is an MVC error as such, more a limitation of http? We had the same issues so ended up swapping “.” for “!” in URLs then converting them back to “.” in the controllers.