[SalesForce] Problem passing period character / email address in Salesforce REST URLmapping

EDIT – I've updated title and added answer, there are issues using . in URLs for Salesforce REST

I am writing a REST web service in salesforce to return information about accounts.
I am finding that when I use an email address in the URI, I get a Salesforce error.

Here's some code to show the problem

@RestResource(urlMapping = '/showaccount/*') 
global without sharing class showAccount {

    @HttpGet
    global static String doGet() {
        String uriRequested = RestContext.request.requestURI;
        System.debug(uriRequested);
        return uriRequested;
    }
}

If I go ahead and make a rest call to the following URL:

/services/apexrest/showaccount/this_sort_of_key_is_fine

then the response is as expected, http code 200 and body of "/showaccount/this_sort_of_key_is_fine"

However if I call the URL and the last part looks like an email address, as follows

/services/apexrest/showaccount/customer@busy.com

then my rest code isn't executed by Salesforce and the response is http code 404 with a body of: [{ "errorCode": "NOT_FOUND", "message": "The requested resource does not exist" }]

The question how-does-salesforce-handle-wildcards-in-a-rest-urlmapping-property is interesting as it seems to me that my problem is also related to how Salesforce is finding the correct rest class from the supplied URL.

I have also found that if I change the urlmapping of the class to /showaccount/*/* then the class is successfully called when I use /showaccount/customer@busy.com/ (but note the trailing / which I would like to avoid).

So my question is

  1. is there a way to make this work so that I can use a call like
    /showaccount/[email address] and get a response?
  2. does this sound like a Salesforce bug?

Best Answer

I have had a response from Salesforce support and I've also done a bit more experimenting. The problem comes from the . character not the @ and the word from salesforce was "using REST API .json and ,xml extension so there is a rule in load balancer that uses regex depending upon how many characters added after dot."

So the following examples are illustrative:

/services/apexrest/showaccount/bob@test          GOOD
/services/apexrest/showaccount/bob@test.co.uk    ALSO GOOD (the pieces after the . only 2 chars long)
/services/apexrest/showaccount/bob@test.com      ERROR 404
/services/apexrest/showaccount/bob@test.com/     GOOD

Looks like with the way that the regex is implemented you should be very careful if the URL can include the period character and terminate the URL with a / if possible

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