ASP.NET - Strange case of inexplicable 404 error - asp.net

We are having a very strange problem on one particular web server (we do not have direct access to the web server, only FTP access).
Our ASP.NET application displays a dataset into a standard GridView. One of the columns in the GridView is a basic template column, with a link redirecting to another page - passing few parameters.
One of the parameters is EmployeeName - and the following page uses that parameter to set a label.
ON this particular web server (WEBSERVER1 in this example)... the resulting link generates an error 404 (page not found)
https://WWW.WEBSERVER1.COM/Customer_011B.aspx?WeekEnding=1/21/2012&GUID=n.a.&EmployeeName=Knutson-Haushalter, Kathleen&ReportToName=Mary Jo Eayrs&Assignment_Id=123772
On another web server (WEBSERVER2 in this example)... the resulting link properly opens the page.
http://WWW.WEBSERVER2.COM/Customer_011B.aspx?WeekEnding=1/21/2012&GUID=n.a.&EmployeeName=Knutson-Haushalter, Kathleen&ReportToName=Mary Jo Eayrs&Assignment_Id=123772
(unfortunately the links above are not rendered correctly
Yes, I am aware that WEBSERVER1 is running under SSL - but am not sure why this would make a difference.
Now, we have verified that the page Customer_011B.aspx is indeed present on WEBSERVER1.
Here comes the puzzle:
If we only remove the EmployeeName parameter, the page displays correctly. All database operations are performed correctly, etc. The only "problem" is that the EmployeeName is not reported in the target label.
In other words:
This DOES NOT work and all we get is error 404
https://WWW.WEBSERVER1.COM/Customer_011B.aspx?WeekEnding=1/21/2012&GUID=n.a.&EmployeeName=Knutson-Haushalter, Kathleen&ReportToName=Mary Jo Eayrs&Assignment_Id=123772
This DOES work and we get to the page and we retrieve all the needed data.
https://WWW.WEBSERVER1.COM/Customer_011B.aspx?WeekEnding=1/21/2012&GUID=n.a.&ReportToName=Mary Jo Eayrs&Assignment_Id=123772
Just in case you are wondering, the only parameter needed by our data access layer is that Assignment_Id number.
Also, note that I enclosed the links in double quotes... so that they would render properly...

Use the UrlEncode and UrlDecode to place the parametres on your url. I see that you use spaces and slash and commas. Parametres with slash/space/comma and other invalid url characters maybe cut or change by enabled url filter on one of the iis server.

Related

Loosing session variable data from one page to the other in VB.NET

I am a bit new to VB.NET. I have a page that sets 2 session variables and does a redirect to second page. The second pages is at least using one of the session variables. I can tell because on the second page, if the session variable is not correct the user is redirected to an access denied page. The second page also uses the session variable in question. It will read it an fill a gridview based on the value of the variable. I set the variable like so
Session("ID") = Convert.ToInt32(a_value)
and on the second page I retrieve the variable like this
a_page_variable = Session("ID")
What I find strange is that when I run this code in visual studio it works as expected but when I deploy and run it, I get 0 from my session variable instead of the true value of "a_value". I have tried a few things like making sure the data types match up from page to page and trying different ways to retrieve the variable such as
Session("userID")
and
CType(Session.Item("userID"), Int32)
I've also tried to see what is coming in to the second page by using
Response.Write
I also tried to use SQL Profiler to see what kind of call is being made to fill the gridview but I haven't had any luck. The gridview gives me an empty dataset and the Profiler does not detect a call being made from the application. I thought working with session variables was pretty straight forward but obviously, I am missing something.
Thanks for your help,
Billy
One possibility (and the only one that could be guessed at with how little information we have) could be the response.redirect causing the application to terminate due to an exception.
When redirecting, you want to always pass a false, and then call complete request.
Response.Redirect(urlstring, False)
Response.CompleteRequest()
not following these steps can cause exceptions, which may drop session.
Additionally, resolve virtual paths, as some browsers (mobile especially) can see those redirects as new requests entirely, thus generating new session tokens.
Dim urlstring As String
urlstring = Page.ResolveUrl("~/default.aspx")
that said, there are a number of possible causes for this situation.
Application Pool restarts
App Domain restarted
Code changing value unexpectedly
AV tinkering with files
deployed to web farm
With the description provided above, we just don't have enough information to really troubleshoot.
Thank you ADyson, Stephen Wrighton and everyone else who took a stab at helping me figure this out. I was able to find out what was going on by adding code that wrote to a log file on the server. Found the logging code here. I found that I never reached the code that set the session variable and that is the reason it never populated on the second page. I was trying to get the logon name for the user by using Environment.UserName which will return the user name of the person who is currently logged on to the operating system. But what I really wanted to do was get the logon name of the user that was visiting my site. For this I used User.Identity.Name. This works great when you need to know which user from an Active Directory domain is visiting your site.

Does Kentico allow query strings with question mark?

I'm trying to migrate my ASPX site to Kentico, and as part of my task I'm migrating URLs. I need to preserve my URL structure, so I need to keep URLs which look like : "foo.com/bar.aspx?pageid=1".
I checked page's "URLs" property tried to use wildcards, some patterns like /bar/{pageid}- /bar/{?pageid?}-, etc but Kentico always replaces question marks.
Is there a way to achieve that via the admin interface?
You don't need to do anything in order to use "foo.com/bar.aspx?pageid=1" url.
Create a page under the root and call it bar, so you'll get a page # foo.com/bar.aspx. Kentico and/or .net does not care what you add to a url after question mark, so foo.com/bar.aspx?pageid=1 will work as well as foo.com/bar.aspx?someparam=sdf, or foo.com/bar.aspx?id=1&p=3&t=3.
You may (or may not) implement some functionality based on query string (e.g. paging), so it will parse query string and act in appropriate way.
By default Kentico UI does not handle adding URL aliases with URL parameters like you show. There is an article on the DevNet for a URL Redirection module which has code you can import into your site to allow you to perform these redirects within the Kentico UI. I'd suggest using this approach.
Unfortunately, I can't share a code sample since it's an article but it also has a link to download the code too. This appears to only be coded for Kentico 8.2 right now but I'm guessing you could do some work to make it work for other versions if you needed.
I think there are few concepts that you are clubbing here. I will start with your line code here
/bar/{pageid} - {pageid} is a positional parameter in Kentico's language if you choose to use dynamic URLS based on patterns. SO if you have a code that relies on pageid parameter to fetch some data then Kentico will pass that value. E.g in case of /bar/420, it will pass pageid as 420 different web parts on your template
/bar/{?pageid?} - This will search for query string parameter "pageid" on the request URL and replace its value here. So if you passed foo.com/bar.aspx?pageid=366, the resulting URL will be /bar/366
The #1 is positional parameter and #2 is the way in which Kentico resolves query string macros.
I hope this clarifies.

ASP.NET Form Action Invalid Percent Encoding

I have a web application that places the user's search term in the query string, in a similar way to Google. E.g. the address might be www.example.com/mysearchpage.aspx?q=searchTerm.
Usually this works fine, but if there is a special character in the search term such as â, the action attribute on the form is encoded to percent encoding and the character is replaced with %u00e2.
If I search for chât I will end up with the URL www.example.com/mysearchpage.aspx?q=châtin the browser's address bar but the action attribute on the form that comes back from the server would be www.example.com/mysearchpage.aspx?q=ch%u00e2t which means that a subsequent form submission fails because the URL is incorrectly formatted.
I have ensured that in IIS the encoding is set to be UTF-8 for Requests, Response Headers and Responses. I have also inspected the page being delivered from IIS in Fiddler and that already includes the incorrectly encoded action.
The encoded format appears to be in a non-standard format as explained in this wikipedia article.
Is there a way to prevent IIS from encoding the form's action in this way?
The solution was to add targetFramework=4.5.2 into the httpRuntime tag in the web.config file.
Previously this was not specified but was specified in the compilation tag, however specifying targetFramework=4.5.1 still caused the problem.

Extract part of an URL behind a login page with Paw

I'm a newbie but I think Paw can do what i need :
I need to extract a session id behind a login page.
I go to https://admin.booking.com, filling the form (login and pass) and the landing page behind includes a session id :
https://admin.booking.com/pc/index.html?ses=xxxxyyyyyzzzzz11112222233333
I'd like to :
1) Push credentials with Paw as part of my request,
2) get the above item (ses) item as a response so i can use the php script extension provided by Paw and then call this script "on demand".
Is this possible ? If so, what should i do ?
Thanks for your help
UPDATE*: we've added a documentation article to describe the process a little more: Login via a web form in Paw. We've detailed the process to deal with CSRF tokens too.
Paw isn't quite yet ready for handling web/HTML forms. Though, there's one way to do it the right way: if you inspect the form with the Chrome dev tools you'll find the name of the input from the DOM/HTML:
In your case, you have the inputs: loginname, password, lang.
Also, find the <form…> tag to see what's the action attribute. If there's no action attribute (like in your example), it means the target URL for your form is the current page's URL (https://admin.booking.com/ in your case). Also, make sure the method="POST" is also there in the <form…> tag, otherwise this method won't work.
Then jump into Paw and set:
URL (in your case https://admin.booking.com/)
method to POST
go to the Body tab and use "Form URL-Encoded + fill up the fields from your form
If all works, you'll see Paw show a redirection request, and if you go to the right-hand side panel under "Response" > "Headers", you should see a Location header with a value similar to the URL you initially mentioned (https://admin.booking.com/pc/index.html?ses=xxxxyyyyyzzzzz11112222233333). Hurray! You got your value into Paw!
Now that you have that, you can create in a new request (click on the + button at the bottom of the left-hand side list). And wherever you want to use this session token/ID, you can insert a dynamic value to retrieve that URL value. You have more infos here, in our docs, but I'll describe the steps here:
On whichever field you want to insert the token, right-click and pick Responses > Response Header.
Make sure you pick the first request in the "Request" dropdown menu, and enter Location in the "Header" field:
You should see the value of the Location header of the previous response appear here.
Now what you want to do is to extract only the part you want (i.e. the value of the ses param in your case). For that you'll need that extension for Paw, so please install it now: https://luckymarmot.com/paw/extensions/RegExMatch
Copy the dynamic value you have just inserted (the blue token), and right-click on that field to insert a new dynamic value, and pick Extensions > RegExp match:
In the Input field, paste the previous dynamic value you copied. And use the RegExp field to write a regular expression that will successfully extract the part of the URL you want (this should work in your case ses=(.*)).
Now that you're set up. You should be able to use this little new blue token wherever you like and automagically extract the value from the previous form. And whenever you send again the initial request, and get a new token, everything else will also update! :)
It was a little long guide, but I hope this will help you and hopefully others too.

Send query string parameter from a non-web application

Ok, I've been bugging with this for too long.
I need to call my website from a rough VB.net app. Then only thing I need is to attach a query string parameter to the calling url, so I can distinguish the pages to be shown to different VB app users.
So I want to click a button and launch that website, giving this parameter.
First I was bugging with adding the system.web libraries. Now I can't use Request/Response.QueryString as well.
I tried getting some example help from this post. but as I said before - I cannot make use of Request.QueryString as I cannot import it.
I am stuck here:
Process.Start("http://localhost:56093/WebSite1?id=")
I need to attach a query string parameter to the url and then open the website with that url.
Can someone just give me a sample code for my problem.
Query parameters are parsed by the web server/http handler off the URL you use to call the page. They consist of key and value pairs that come at the end of the URL. Your code is nearly there. Say you needed to pass through the parameters:
ID = 1234
Page = 2
Display = Portrait
Then you'd turn them into a URL like this:
http://localhost:56093/WebSite1?ID=1234&Page=2&Display=Portrait
Therefore in your code you'd have:
Process.Start("http://localhost:56093/WebSite1?ID=1234&Page=2&Display=Portrait");

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