Allowing plus character in path in ASP.NET and IIS7.5

Question

I have an ASP.NET Web Forms website that uses .NET 4 routing to handle custom URLs.

Somebody in our organisation decided to advertise a URL with a plus sign in it (eg. www.domain.com/this+that), so now I am stuck with having to modify the system to recognise this URL and route it to the correct page.

It's a .NET 4.0 website running on IIS7.5.

I have researched how to do this already, and the advice has been to add the following to my web.config file, which I have done. But still I get a IIS 404 error message, and it doesn't even go to my custom 404 error page.

<system.webServer>
  <security>
    <requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true">
    </requestFiltering>
  </security>
</system.webServer>

Any idea why this isn't working?

Answer 1

I can only speak from personal experience, but try one of these:

MVC:

    [ActionName("this+that")]
    public ActionResult ThisThat()
    {
        return View("ThisThat");
    }

web.config redirect:

<location path="this+that">
<system.webServer>
<httpRedirect enabled="true" destination="www.domain.com/this_that" httpResponseStatus="Permanent" />
</system.webServer>
</location>

Update: Working on my end. Make sure web.config looks like this:

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0" />
    </system.web>
    <system.webServer>
        <security>
            <requestFiltering allowDoubleEscaping="true" />
        </security>
    </system.webServer>

And Global.asax should look like the following:

    protected void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
    {
        routes.MapPageRoute("Test", "This+That", "~/Test.aspx");

    }