Kentico: PortalTemplate.aspx explicitly throwing a 404 error when directly invoked - kentico

Question

We work on a product that is a series of components that could be installed on different CMSs and provide different services. We take a CMS agnostic approach and try to use the same code in all the CMSs as much as possible (we try to avoid using CMS API as much as we can).
Some part of the code needs to work with the current URL for some redirections so we use Request.Url.ToString() that is something that has worked fine in other environments but in Kentico instead of returning the current page we always get a reference to CMSPages/PortalTemplate.aspx with a querystring parameter aliasPath that holds the real URL. In addition to that, requesting the Template page using a browser gives you a 404 error.
Example:
Real URL (this works fine on a browser):
(1) https://www.customer.com/Membership/Questionnaire?Id=7207f9f9-7354-df11-88d9-005056837252
Request.Url.ToString() (this gives you a 404 error on a browser):
(2) https://www.customer.com/CMSPages/PortalTemplate.aspx?Id=7207f9f9-7354-df11-88d9-005056837252&aliaspath=/Membership/Questionnaire
I've noticed that the 404 error is thrown explicitly by the template code when invoked directly. Please see below code from Page_Init method of PortalTemplate.aspx.cs:
var resolvedTemplatePage = URLHelper.ResolveUrl(URLHelper.PortalTemplatePage);
if (RequestContext.RawURL.StartsWithCSafe(resolvedTemplatePage, true))
{
// Deny direct access to this page
RequestHelper.Respond404();
}
base.OnInit(e);
So, if I comment the above code out my redirection works fine ((2) resolves to (1)). I know it is not an elegant solution but since I cannot / don't want to use Kentico API is the only workaround I could find.
Note that I know that using Kentico API will solve the issue since I'm sure I will find an API method that will return the actual page. I'm trying to avoid that as much as possible.
Questions: Am I breaking something? Is there a better way of achieving what I trying to accomplish? Can you think on any good reason I shouldn't do what I'm doing (security, usability, etc)?
This is kind of a very broad question so I was not able to find any useful information on Kentico docs.
I'm testing all this on Kentico v8.2.50 which is the version one of my customers currently have.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It's not really recommended to edit the source files of Kentico, as you may start to run into issues with future upgrades and also start to see some unexpected behaviour.
If you want to get the original URL sent to the server before Kentico's routing has done its work, you can use Page.Request.RawUrl. Using your above example, RawUrl would return a value of /Membership/Questionnaire?Id=7207f9f9-7354-df11-88d9-005056837252, whereas Url will return a Uri with a value of https://www.customer.com/CMSPages/PortalTemplate.aspx?Id=7207f9f9-7354-df11-88d9-005056837252&aliaspath=/Membership/Questionnaire (as you stated).
This should avoid needing to use the Kentico API and also avoid having to change a file that pretty much every request goes through when using the portal engine.
If you need to get the full URL to redirect to, you can use something like this:
var redirectUrl = Request.Url.GetLeftPart(UriPartial.Authority) + Request.RawUrl;