Intermittent asp.net mvc exception: “A public action method ABC could not be found on controller XYZ.”

Question

I\'m getting an intermittent exception saying that asp.net mvc can’t find the action method. Here’s the exception:

A public action method \'Fill\' cou

Answer 1

We found the answer. We looked into our web logs. It showed that we were receiving some weird http actions (verbs/methods) like OPTIONS, PROPFIND and HEAD.

This seems to the cause of some of theses exceptions. This explains why it was intermittent.

We reproduced the issue with the curl.exe tool:

curl.exe -X OPTIONS http://localhost/v2.3.1.0/(S(boztz1aquhzurevtjwllzr45))/Form/Fill/273
curl.exe -X PROPFIND http://localhost/v2.3.1.0/(S(boztz1aquhzurevtjwllzr45))/Form/Fill/273
curl.exe -X HEAD http://localhost/v2.3.1.0/(S(boztz1aquhzurevtjwllzr45))/Form/Fill/273

The fix we used was to add an authorization section to web.config: