Webapi has problems with some characters.

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So I have an APIservice made that does a lot of stuff with data.
One thing it does is get 'Candidates' by their Login data.

Code like this does the job

[HttpGet]
        [Route("{name}/{password}/ByNameAndPassword")]
        public async Task<HttpResponseMessage> GetCandidateByNameAndPasswordAsync(string name, string password)
        {
            var candidate = await candidatesManager.GetCandidateByNameAndPasswordAsync(name, password);

            if (candidate.CandidateId != 0) { return Request.CreateResponse(System.Net.HttpStatusCode.OK, candidate); }
            else { return Request.CreateErrorResponse(HttpStatusCode.NotFound, "Candidate with the requested credentials not found."); }
        }

However, this works in many cases. But in some cases with characters this code isn't even reached by the sender/client.

The problem only happens by a Get.
Inserting data is not a problem.

Example: when I use a Name or Password containing the following list of characters it doesn't work.

#
%
&
*
:
"
'
<
>
?
/
.

My question will be obvious: why doesn't it work if one or more of these characters are involved in case of a GET?

What I have tried:

I have tried anything I could com up with but I really have no ideas anymore.

Posted 11-Dec-19 10:34am

Wiep Corbier

Updated 11-Dec-19 14:52pm

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MadMyche · Accepted Answer · 2019-12-11T14:53:00

Well... the problem is quite evident; many of these are various control or otherwise special characters.

The %, &, #, and / should be visible to anyone who has looked at a URL as separators, fragment identifiers, routing, and escape characters.

I personally would not use GET with a password, as it is just going to be a part of the URL and is subject to browser caching and logging within the server logs.

The solution can be quite evasive to find; especially if you intend on keeping this as a GET method.
In Net Framework, you could work with various elements in the web.config file to relax the various character restrictions, I do not know how to do in a Net.Core/Kestrel environment at this time.
Hopefully the following config references can guide you
Look here:

XML

<system.web>
     <httpRuntime

And here:

XML

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