Encoded slash (%2F) with Spring RequestMapping path param gives HTTP 400

Question

This is not a duplicate referenced question, because it is Spring specific. Whoever added that (3 years after the fact!) didn't bother to read the question or comment thread to see what the real answer was. The accepted answer isn't quite the answer, but the author of the answer never came back and edited it like I asked.

Given the restful method below, Spring 3.1 gives a 400 error with "The request sent by the client was syntactically incorrect ()." when the token parameter contains a URL encoded slash (%2F), for example "https://somewhere.com/ws/stuff/lookup/resourceId/287559/token/R4o6lI%2FbBx43/userName/jim" Without the %2F everything works fine. A 3rd party is already calling this service (of course!) so I can't change what they send, in the short term at least. Any ideas on how to work around this on the server side?

This problem is described very well here https://jira.springsource.org/browse/SPR-8662 though that issue is related to UriTemplate which I am not using that I can tell.

@RequestMapping("/ws/stuff/**")
@Controller
public class StuffController {
  @RequestMapping(value = "/ws/stuff/lookup/resourceId/{resourceId}/token/{token}/userName/{userName}", method = RequestMethod.GET)
   public @ResponseBody
   String provisionResource(@PathVariable("resourceId") String resourceId, @PathVariable("token") String token, @PathVariable("userName") String userName, ModelMap modelMap,
         HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) {
      return handle(resourceId, userName, request, token, modelMap);
   }
}

Note: This is on Glassfish 3.1.2, and at first it was Grizzly/Glassfish not accepting the slash, but

-Dcom.sun.grizzly.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH=true

fixed that.

asadmin set configs.config.server-config.network-config.protocols.protocol.http-listener-2.http.encoded-slash-enabled=true

didn't seem to help.

Answer 1

This could be your answer: urlencoded Forward slash is breaking URL

I would suggest not putting that in the path, move it to a request param instead.

Work around:

You could change the RequestMapping to

@RequestMapping(value = "/ws/stuff/lookup/resourceId/**", method = RequestMethod.GET) 

and then parse the path variables manually from the request object.