Using a backslash (%5c) in a REST WCF URL

Question

I am building a REST service on WCF, and one of the methods I am writing is GetProfile, which will return the profile for a given username. The username will include the user's domain, and so will have the following format: "DOMAIN\username".

I therefore have a service called Profiles.svc, which has the following endpoint set up:

[OperationContract]
[WebGet(UriTemplate = "/{username}", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml)]
IRestResponse GetProfile(String username);

However, when I attempt to visit the service at http://server/profiles.svc/DOMAIN%5cusername (%5c is the urlencoded form of a backslash) I get the following error:

Server error in '/' Application
HTTP Error 400 - Bad Request

This occurs even when there is no code actually defined in my implementation of GetProfile, so I believe the error is being thrown at the point WCF attempts to bind the URI to a method.

Are there some settings I need to add to my web service configuration in order to allow backslashes to be added to URLs in a REST WCF service? Or are backslashes simply not allowed?

Answer 1

I suspect that they are simply not allowed in that part of the url. They are fine in the query string as long as they are encoded. As a general rule i wouldn't put anything in the path part of the url that is invalid in filename (i.e. ?).

Perhaps you could use a different character to deliminate th domain from the username.

You could also seperate the username into domainname and username and use the normal path deliminator '/'. I'm not familar with the this enough to know if this is how you do it for sure, but this would be my best guess.

[OperationContract]
[WebGet(UriTemplate = "/{domainName}/{username}", ResponseFormat = WebMessageFormat.Xml)]
IRestResponse GetProfile(String domainName, String username);

Answer 2

Thanks for the response. The clarification that %5c might be allowed in the querystring, but not in the path is useful. And yes, I was coming to the conclusion that separating the domain name and username into separate parts of the URI path is the way forward.