Passing special characters to an MVC 5 controller with javascript parameters

Question

I am trying to allow the user to edit names in an MVC application.

The controller function has this signature:

[Route("function/edit/{id:int}/{name}/{sortorder:int}")]
public ActionResult Edit(int id, string name, int sortorder)
{...}

I am calling it in Javascript like this:

window.location.href = "@Url.Action("Edit", "Function")" + "/" + id + "/" + name + "/" + order;

It all works fine, until the name contains '/' or the name ends with a '.' then i get a "The resource cannot be found." from the server. This makes perfect sense, since the '/' and '.' characters rightly confuses the routing...

But how should i do this?? I want to allow '/' and '.' in the names.

I already tried encodeURIComponent and escape. None of them do anything about '.' or '/' — Jakob Olsen
– Jakob Olsen, Commented Feb 20, 2015 at 11:08

DavidG · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-20 11:32:37Z

3

You need to encode the data so characters such as / are passed correctly. For this you should use the encodeURIComponent function:

window.location.href = 
    "@Url.Action("Edit", "Function")" + "/" + id + "/" + 
        encodeURIComponent(name) + "/" + order;

For example, this is the difference before and after encoding:

var test = "this.is/a test";
alert(test);
alert(encodeURIComponent(test));

Additional to this, your MVC application is also having issues due to the way it decodes the URL. One solution to this is to reorder the parameters in your route to have the name value last and give it a catch-all modifier:

[Route("function/edit/{id:int}/{sortorder:int}/{*name}")]

This forces MVC routing to pick up the last part as the entire value for name.

edited Feb 20, 2015 at 11:32

answered Feb 20, 2015 at 11:03

DavidG

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8 Comments

Jakob Olsen Over a year ago

encodeURIComponent(name) doesn't do anything about '.' or '/'

DavidG Over a year ago

@JakobOlsen Yes it does, see the link which specifically states it encodes the / and the edit I have made with an example.

Jakob Olsen Over a year ago

My bad... It does in fact encode '/'. It doesn't solve the problem though. I still get the "The resource cannot be found." error even when the / is encoded

DavidG Over a year ago

@JakobOlsen So you do need the encoding, but I've also made an edit for an MVC specific issue too.

Jakob Olsen Over a year ago

Nice suggestions, but it still doesn't work. I think the problem may be, that the url is decoded before the routing even sees it. If i want the name to be "allan / bert", then the mvc-routing will see the url "function/edit/1/2/allan / bert" even if it was url-encoded when recieved.

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