We have a requirement to have a dot midway in a route for one of our web api services. The route looks something like http://localhost/api/some.route/person. The controller (if using attribute based routing) is:

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[RoutePrefix("api/some.route")]
public class UsersController : ApiController
{
  [Route("person")]
  public HttpResponseMessage Person(int id)
  {
    // do stuff
  }
}

When you try to hit this resource using fiddler or postman, you’ll get a 404 not found error. There are plenty of StackOverflow posts out there about having dots in the route but these mainly are to do with a dot at the end of the route rather than midway so something like http://localhost/api/someroute/per.son. IIS will identify the dot and assume you are after a static file with an extension of ‘son’. To get around this, you can add this to your web.config file as explained by Phil Haack.

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<system.web>
  <httpRuntime relaxedUrlToFileSystemMapping="true" />

However this will not work where the dot is midway in the URL like I have. For me, adding the following resolves the issue (although not having to have a dot in the route would be the obvious solution but sometimes your hands are tied).

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<system.webServer>
  <handlers>
    <add name="UrlRoutingHandler" type="System.Web.Routing.UrlRoutingHandler, System.Web, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a" path="some.route/*" verb="*"/>

Adding this post as I KNOW I will forget this!