URL routing documentation question - asp.net

I'm reading about URL routing at How to: Define Routes for Web Forms Applications and there's something in the example I don't understand. If you look at the example provided below,
routes.MapPageRoute("", "SalesReport/{locale}/{year}/{*queryvalues}", "~/sales.aspx");
specifically at
"SalesReport/{locale}/{year}/{*queryvalues}"
Why does queryvalues have an asterisk in front of it and locale and year don't?

The * indicates a "catch all" parameter, which essentially matches everything else in the requested URL.
Everything after the "year" parameter in the URL will get dumped into the queryvalues parameter. So for example, the URL
http://whatever/SalesReport/canada/1999/x=1
will give you a queryvalues variable populated with "x=1". But it will also match the URL
http://whatever/SalesReport/canada/1999/x=1/y=2/z=3
and queryvalues will be populated with "x=1/y=2/z=3".
You can only have one catch-all parameter in your route, and it has to be the final parameter.

Related

URL parameters and backbone routing

Backbone.js maintains routing information in a URL after the hash mark, e.g.:
http://localhost:3000#page/hardware/table/?action=details&actionTargetId=5&actionTargetName=10.3.177.185&actionTarget=host
Even though the routing information is in the format ?p1=v1&p2=v2&p3=v3, this portion is not technically part of the url query string since it comes after the hash mark.
My question is if I add an actual query string to our app's urls like this:
http://localhost:3000?newparam=newvalue#page/hardware/table/?action=details&actionTargetId=5&actionTargetName=10.3.177.185&actionTarget=host
is there any possibility of the "newparam" url parameter interfering with the backbone portion?
the problem is your not actually creating a legit query string. your mixing your route with your parameters.
your example is formatted as:
domain ? param # route ? other params
as soon as a questionmark appears in a url everything after it is interpreted as a query string. (in this case) even your route.
personally i suggest using the html5 pushstate.
Backbone.history.start({pushState: true})
this will give you clean(er) urls
http://localhost:3000/page/hardware/table/?newparam=newvalue&action=details&actionTargetId=5&actionTargetName=10.3.177.185&actionTarget=host
that will help your routes to not interfere with your parameters.

Having two ? in a URL - Is it valid?

Here is the thing:
Let's say I have a base URL like this:
www.mysite.com?my_first_param=1&my_second_param=2
But now I want to add a new parameter to my URL:
www.mysite.com?my_first_param=1&my_second_param=2&my_redirect_site=www.myothersite.com
Imagine that I am using a service where they add new tracking parameters to my URL. For example:
first_tracking=value1&second_value=value2
Since my BASE url already has a "?" the parameters are added with a "&", so my final URL would look like this:
www.mysite.com?my_first_param=1&my_second_param=2&my_redirect_site=www.myothersite.com&first_tracking=value1&second_value=value2
This is a correct URL with several parameters, but when I do the redirect to www.myothersite.com, since the parameters start with a "&", they get lost. Would it be correct to add the tracking parameters with a starting "?" ? Like this:
www.mysite.com?my_first_param=1&my_second_param=2&my_redirect_site=www.myothersite.com?first_tracking=value1&second_value=value2
If not, what would be a good approach for dealing with this? I believe is responsibility of the redirect to pass through the tracking parameters to the redirect URL.
You should URLencode each param name and value properly, so if the map of params you want is this:
my_first_param => 1
my_second_param => 2
my_redirect_site => www.myothersite.com?first_tracking=value1&second_value=value2
then you should pass this as the query string:
?my_first_param=1&my_second_param=2&my_redirect_site=www.myothersite.com%3Ffirst_tracking%3Dvalue1%26second_value%3Dvalue2
You should be using a library which does this already to build up URIs to handle this encoding for you.
No, you can't have a second question mark in a URL.
Furthermore, if you have ampersands in the redirect URL, they will be seen as separate parameters for the main URL, and not seen as connected to the redirect URL.
If you want to do a redirect like this, you need to URLEncode the whole of the redirected URL. There are standard functions in most web-facing languages to do this.
Encode the parameter, "?" would be replaced by %3F
It depends on the amount of control you have over the service adding the tracking parameters.
Can you change the url after the parameters have been added?
If you can, then you should use a url builder to add the tracking parameters to your redirect url, then url encode that url entriely, tracking parameters included.
If you are not in control and a third party modifies your url, then you will have to do this when you redirect, read the parameters in the url, take your redirect url and the tracking parameters, add the tracking parameters to the redirect url before redirect.

Raw, unprocessed URL with ASP.NET Routing

I'm using ASP.NET UrlRoutingModule directly (not through MVC) to map certain routes to their handlers:
RouteTable.Routes.Add(new Route("products/{name}", handler));
Then, at request time, I'm getting the values from each route:
RouteData routeData = HttpContext.Current.Request.RequestContext.RouteData;
routeData.Values.TryGetValue("name", out value);
Everything fine so far, I'm getting the proper values for each route. My problem is encoding: I want to get the raw value of a route data. Example: for the route above, if the requested URL is http://example.com/products/word%2Dword the resulted "name" is "word-word". What I want though is the exact value "word%2Dword".
I know that with ASP.NET I can get the raw unprocessed URL using Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_URL"] but unfortunately I cannot use this here.
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
EDIT
My specific problem is that I would like to get more products in a single request using their names. I have for example the following product names: "student,pupil" and "sick,ill" (their name contains a comma). I'm also using a comma to separate names in the request.
I handle the encoding on the client side so the GET request looks like this: http://example.com/products/student%2Cpupil,sick%2Cill (I'm encoding each name separately but I'm not encoding the separator).
On the server side the "name" parameter will be automatically decoded by ASP.NET and the result is: "student,pupil,sick,ill" so now I don't know which is the separator. Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_URL"] returns the URL as I want it ("products/student%2Cpupil,sick%2Cill") so I suppose there has to be a way to get the raw value as a route data.
The "raw value" you're seeing isn't actually the original value, it's what was encoded to make the URL safe for the HTTP Protocol.
http://example.com/products/word%2Dword for instance started out as http://example.com/products/word-word and is turned back into word-word as it comes out of the HTTP transport layer.
If you pass it through Server.URLEncode you will get back the same encoded value (%2D instead of -) - but if you can't use Server variables, are you going to have access to the Server object?

ASP.NET routing: Literal sub-segment between tokens, and route values with a character from the literal sub-segment

The reason I'm asking is because IIS protects certain ASP.NET folders, like Bin, App_Data, App_Code, etc. Even if the URL does not map to an actual file system folder IIS rejects a URL with a path segment equal to one of the mentioned names.
This means I cannot have a route like this:
{controller}/{action}/{id}
... where id can be any string e.g.
Catalog/Product/Bin
So, instead of disabling this security measure I'm willing to change the route, using a suffix before the id, like these:
{controller}/{action}_{id} // e.g. Catalog/Product_Bin
{controller}/{action}/_{id} // e.g. Catalog/Product/_Bin
But these routes won't work if the id contains the new delimeter, _ in this case, e.g.
// These URL won't work (I get 404 response)
Catalog/Product_Bin_
Catalog/Product/_Bin_
Catalog/Product/__Bin
Why? I don't know, looks like a bug to me. How can I make these routes work, where id can be any string?
Ok, I have a definitive answer. Yes, this is a bug. However, at this point I regret to say we have no plans to fix it for a couple of reasons:
It's a breaking change and could be a very hard to notice one at that.
There's an easy workaround.
What you can do is change the URL to not have the underscore:
{controller}/{action}/_{id}
Then add a route constraint that requires that the ID parameter starts with an underscore character.
Then within your action method you trim off the underscore prefix from the id parameter. You could even write an action filter to do this for you if you liked. Sorry for the inconvenience.
You can use characters that are not allowed for a directory or file name like: *,?,:,",<,>,|.
With ASP.NET MVC if you look at the source they have a hard-coded value for the path separator (/) and to my knowledge cannot be changed.

MVC Routes: Adding an optional parameter at the beginning of a route

I have the following routes setup in my route config file. I have a config reader that maps these to MVC-style routes.
[route name="customers" url="customers/{statename}/{marketname}/{pagenumber}"]
[controller name="Customers" action="Display" /]
[/route]
[route name="pcustomers" url="{customername}/customers/{statename}/{marketname}/{pagenumber}"]
[controller name="Customers" action="Display" /]
[/route]
As you can tell, the first and second route are pretty much the same but for the {customername} part in the second one.
The first one matches urls like
www.abc.com/customers/TX/Austin/5
where as the second one matches urls like
www.abc.com/CustomerX/customers/TX/Austin/5
My question is, is there a way to combine these two routes into one and still be able to match both the urls?
Could you use subdomains and change the second URL to customerx.abc.com/customers/tx/Austin/5? What about tacking the customerx potion onto the end as an optional parameter like so?
abc.com/customers/tx/Austin/5?customer=x
I would've made the route like this:
customers/{statename}/{marketname}/{customer}
and do the pagenumber as a querystring.
That way the url would be:
www.abc.com/customers/tx/Austin?pagenumber=1
or
www.abc.com/customers/tx/Austin/CustomerX
The construction of the url will also most likely follow the usagepattern of the site aswell:
Click Customers
Select a State
Select a marketname
Browse pages
Click the customer

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