How to have a custom 404 and 500 error pages with a stock standard ASP.NET MVC3 website?

Question

I\'m trying to have 2 custom error pages in a stock sample ASP.NET MVC3 website.

Darin Dimitrov has a good SO answer here but it\'s not working for all my test condition

Answer 1

This seems to be a big question here.

See my answer is this post:

Once and for all what is the best routing approach to handle errors, exceptions and 404's in MVC

But i would add these routes to your test cases:

http://www.website.com/yourcontroller/youraction:32

and

http://www.website.com/yourcontroller/youraction/http:/www.website.com/yourcontroller/youraction?par=123

Answer 2

I specify customErrors in my web.config file as below;

    <customErrors defaultRedirect="/Error/GeneralError" mode="On">
      <error statusCode="403" redirect="/Error/403" />
      <error statusCode="404" redirect="/Error/404" />
      <error statusCode="500" redirect="/Error/500" />
    </customErrors

I have a route in the Global.asax as below;

            /// Error Pages
            /// 
            routes.MapRoute(
                "Error", // Route name
                "Error/{errorCode}", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Page", action = "Error", errorCode= UrlParameter.Optional }
            );

The corresponding ActionResult does the following, which returns the relevant custom error page.

//
        public ActionResult Error(string errorCode)
        {
            var viewModel = new PageViewModel();

            int code = 0;
            int.TryParse(errorCode, out code);

            switch (code)
            {
                case 403:
                    viewModel.HtmlTitleTag = GlobalFunctions.FormatTitleTag("403 Forbidden");
                    return View("403", viewModel);
                case 404:
                    viewModel.HtmlTitleTag = GlobalFunctions.FormatTitleTag("404 Page Not Found");
                    return View("404", viewModel);
                case 500:
                     viewModel.HtmlTitleTag = GlobalFunctions.FormatTitleTag("500 Internal Server Error");
                    return View("500", viewModel);
                default:
                    viewModel.HtmlTitleTag = GlobalFunctions.FormatTitleTag("Embarrassing Error");
                    return View("GeneralError", viewModel);
            }
        }

This allows me to have many different custom error pages. It's maybe not the best or most elegant solution, but it certainly works for me.

Answer 3

You can set your error page information in the web.config. This page talks about doing this and using the HandleErrorAttribute set on your controllers so they use this configuration.

http://deanhume.com/Home/BlogPost/custom-error-pages-in-mvc/4