Forbidden characters

General restrictions

In order to avoid script injections attack in some circustances (e.g. cross domain to co-located web servers in the same hot that CB) the following characters are forbidden in any request:

• <
• >
• "
• '
• =
• ;
• (
• )

Any attemp of using them will result in a NGSI 400 Bad Request response like this:

{
    "orionError": {
        "code": "400",
        "details": "Illegal value for JSON field",
        "reasonPhrase": "Bad Request"
    }
}

If your aplication needs to use these characteres, you should encode it using a scheme not including forbidden characters before sending the request to Orion (e.g. URL encoding).

There is another set of characters that requires special care from the user perspective. Namely, the ones in the following list:

• ?
• /
• %
• &

These characters have special meaning in the URL interpretation, and, considering there are convenience operations that use entity, type and attribute identifiers as part of the URL, their use should be avoided. The use of these characters is perfectly safe when only standard operations are involved, anyway.

Specific restrictions for ID fields

NGSIv2 introduces syntax restrictions for ID fields (such as entity id/type, attribute name/type or metadata name/type) which are described in the "Field syntax restrictions" section in the NGSIv2 specification. You can also enable them for NGSIv1, as described in this section of the documentation.