asp.net core controller action route uses encoded slash to determine route (IIS only)

I have an asp.net core 2.2 mvc action method and GET it from the client JavaScript code :

[Route("/search/{searchterm}")]
public IActionResult Search(string searchterm)
{
    // code
}

Now, when I navigate to search with the searchstring abc/def the uri in the browser is /search/abc%2Fdef because the / gets encoded

I get a 404 though, because the routing attribute decoded the slash and the says /search/abc/def does not match my route. What I want is to treat the %2F as a normal piece of content so the searchstring is abc/def inside of my action method.

Funny(?) thing is, this does not happen on my local machine where I run from VS2017 (which runs Kestrel I guess) but only on the test server where it runs on IIS.

Is this an IIS thing? or maybe the loadbalancer is doing something?

You can use an asterisk to indicate that searchterm can contain slashes. This is called a catch-all parameter, and looks like this:

[Route("/search/{**searchterm}")]
public IActionResult Search(string searchterm)
{
    // code
}

From the documentation:

You can use an asterisk (*) or double asterisk (**) as a prefix to a route parameter to bind to the rest of the URI. These are called a catch-all parameters. For example, blog/{**slug} matches any URI that starts with /blog and has any value following it, which is assigned to the slug route value. Catch-all parameters can also match the empty string.

The catch-all parameter escapes the appropriate characters when the route is used to generate a URL, including path separator (/) characters. For example, the route foo/{*path} with route values { path = "my/path" } generates foo/my%2Fpath. Note the escaped forward slash. To round-trip path separator characters, use the ** route parameter prefix. The route foo/{**path} with { path = "my/path" } generates foo/my/path.

Recommended topics

Hot tags