Backbone.js unable to find module if my url contains "period"

Question

I am trying to pass targetURL using get method. This is the URL that i tried: http://localhost:8000/login/auth?targetURL=www.google.com Backbone.js will return "Cannot GET /login/auth?targetURL=www.google.com"

By right, get variable should not affect the module i'm going into it. if i remove the "period", the url works well. for e.g : http://localhost:8000/login/auth?targetURL=wwwgooglecom

this is how my routes look like

routes: {
        'logout': 'logout',
        ':level1': 'subpageAction',
        'logout/:authFail': 'logout',
        ':level1/:level2': 'subpageAction',
        ':level1/:level2/:level3': 'subpageAction',
        ':level1/:level2/:level3/:level4': 'subpageAction',
        '': 'subpageAction'
    },

Does anyone have the same issue? The issue only happen when i put "." in my url. Anyone can help on this issue?

If `targetURL=www` (without dot) then all works as expected ? If yes, then which version of Backbone are you using ? — coding_idiot, Jul 08 '16 at 19:32
@coding_idiot im using backbone.js 1.1.2. Yes, target URL works without the dots. — Kimberlee Ho, Jul 10 '16 at 04:35
It looks like more a server routing problem than a frontend one — steo, Jul 10 '16 at 09:56
can you please post Http status code which you can find in network tab of developer tool? — nikhil mehta, Jul 13 '16 at 09:08
@nikhilmehta its showing 404 as status code. I really suspect its my server routing issue instead of the frontend. But url rewrite are all enabled and .htaccess are coded correctly. — Kimberlee Ho, Jul 13 '16 at 15:59
@Kimberlee Try http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13298542/apicontroller-returns-404-when-id-contains-period or add in your web config — nikhil mehta, Jul 14 '16 at 08:13

score 1 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:14

You are running into RFC 3986 issues. While W3C standards for form submission declared that the dot didn't need to be substituted with %2E, practice is that there are been so many hacks with '..' hiding in form submissions that different layers of software will trip you up rendering even encoding the dot as %2E ineffective.

One solution that may work, depending on your exact use case, is to toss a trailing slash to the end of the URL, e.g., www.google.com/ instead of www.google.com.

You might want to look at these two questions as well. There is no perfect answer here, just near perfect ones.

Backbone.js unable to find module if my url contains "period"

1 Answers1