Hot to add validation of folder names in CMS5 filemanager
After migration of a CMS4 site we started to get a lot of reports of links that had stopped working.
I remembered that we had trouble with non allowed characters in an other site some time ago.
A quick check and sure enough we had a problem with “&” characters in some of the folder names.
In CMS 6 a validation has been added to avoid these problems but not in a default CMS 5 R2site.
Luckily there is an easy fix. Replacing the standard
<virtualPath customFileSummary="~/FileSummary.config" /> row in web.config with the below adds the validation.
<virtualPath customFileSummary="~/FileSummary.config" illegalCharactersRegex="%|&|\+|/COM[0-9]([/\.]|$)|/LPT[0-9]([/\.]|$)|/PRN([/\.]|$)|/CLOCK\$([/\.]|$)|/AUX([/\.]|$)|/NUL([/\.]|$)|/CON([/\.]|$)|/.+\.$" illegalCharactersDisplayString="%,&,+,COM,LPT,PRN,CLOCK$,AUX,CON,NUL,*.">
I don’t understand why this functionality isn’t activated by default in CMS5 and a recommendation to anyone upgrading a pre CMS5 site is to go through all the folders and correct any incorrect folder names.
@Per: The & character became restricted in one of the later IIS versions that has a default setting to not allow characters that can be decoded several times. That why we added the & character to the list of unwanted characters first in the CMS 6 version. There is even the posibility to allow the "&"-character. See the original form thread about the issue here: http://world.episerver.com/Modules/Forum/Pages/thread.aspx?id=34240