Having issues replacing cfusion_encrypt with encrypt()

Question

we have a series of applications that use cfusion_encrypt() to encrypt query strings passed between and with in  applications.  We are currently running CF10 and are not experiencing any problems.  We are looking at upgrading to CF11 and are now experiencing a plethora of errors related to encrypt/decrypt.
the issue i am currently working on is related to encrypt a url.  no matter how I code the key,algorythm, or encoding, The encrypted portion of the url shows up as part of the link.
example:
<cfset theURL ="method=c.login&pid=validateLoginObj&vid=0&datasource=foo">
<cfset encryptedUURL ="http://localhost/1/2/inventory/index.cfm?encrypt(theURL, '123','CFMX_COMPAT','UU')">
<a class="nav_link" href="#encryptedUURL#">Inventory</a>
when the page is displayed, the user sees:
"WL.5KP1EY"3\'?=KH1* target="blank"> Inventory " as the link
(yes I shortened the encrypted string for demo purposes)
this sort of thing is through out 8 major applications
any suggestions on how to prevent this?
Message was edited by: john birdsell

Answer 1

As @fergusondj correctly shows, your URL is incorrect because you encrypt all of it, so the http://localhost  part is not even working and the URL cannot even resolve. You need to tag on the encrypted part to the unencrypted URL prefix, otherwise the link won't work at all. That is the crux of the problem, so this is what the code should really look like:
<cfset theURL ="method=c.login&pid=validateLoginObj&vid=0&datasource=foo">
<cfset encryptedUURL = encrypt(theURL, '123', 'CFMX_COMPAT', 'UU')>
<a class="nav_link" href="http://localhost/1/2/inventory/index.cfm?<cfoutput>#URLEncodedFormat(encryptedUURL)#</cfoutput>">Inventory</a>
To ensure that the URL has all valid characters you can use URLEncodedFormat(). You can URLDecode() the other way around when you process the link.