Rajeev Pentyala – Technical Blog on Power Platform, Azure and AI

In this quick tip, lets see how to handle special characters while querying the Dataverse Web API.

Assume that you have a Dataverse Team with name CoE&Feb&Makers as below and you would want to query the Team by ‘Team Name’ using Dataverse Web API.

Query Dataverse Web API:

• To query the ‘Team’ record with name CoE&Feb&Makers using Web API, we can form the URL as below and execute from the browser.
  • https://xxx.xxx.xxx.api.crm.dynamics.com/api/data/v9.2/teams?$select=teamid&$filter=(name eq ‘CoE&Feb&Makers‘)

• When you hit the URL, you will get an exception that ‘The query parameter is not supported‘. This is because the team name CoE&Feb&Makers is having & symbol, which is not supported.
• To fix this, you need to encode the team’s name. You can use online editor to encode, if you are querying the Web API from browser.

• Now use the encoded value CoE%26Feb%26Makers in the Filter and you should get the result.

• Use HttpUtility.UrlEncode method to encode, if you are querying the Dataverse Web API using C#.

🙂