Why Response.Redirect causes System.Threading.ThreadAbortException?

Question

When I use Response.Redirect(...) to redirect my form to a new page I get the error:

A first chance exception of type \'System.Threading.ThreadAbortEx

Answer 1

There is no simple and elegant solution to the Redirect problem in ASP.Net WebForms. You can choose between the Dirty solution and the Tedious solution

Dirty: Response.Redirect(url) sends a redirect to the browser, and then throws a ThreadAbortedException to terminate the current thread. So no code is executed past the Redirect()-call. Downsides: It is bad practice and have performance implications to kill threads like this. Also, ThreadAbortedExceptions will show up in exception logging.

Tedious: The recommended way is to call Response.Redirect(url, false) and then Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest() However, code execution will continue and the rest of the event handlers in the page lifecycle will still be executed. (E.g. if you perform the redirect in Page_Load, not only will the rest of the handler be executed, Page_PreRender and so on will also still be called - the rendered page will just not be sent to the browser. You can avoid the extra processing by e.g. setting a flag on the page, and then let subsequent event handlers check this flag before before doing any processing.

(The documentation to CompleteRequest states that it "Causes ASP.NET to bypass all events and filtering in the HTTP pipeline chain of execution". This can easily be misunderstood. It does bypass further HTTP filters and modules, but it doesn't bypass further events in the current page lifecycle.)

The deeper problem is that WebForms lacks a level of abstraction. When you are in a event handler, you are already in the process of building a page to output. Redirecting in an event handler is ugly because you are terminating a partially generated page in order to generate a different page. MVC does not have this problem since the control flow is separate from rendering views, so you can do a clean redirect by simply returning a RedirectAction in the controller, without generating a view.