ASP.net MVC [HandleError] not catching exceptions

Question

In two different application, one a custom the other the sample MVC application you get with a new VS2008 MVC project, [HandleError] is not catching exceptions.

In t

Answer 1

Important: Be careful that your error page itself does not have an error on it!

If it does you'll end up with that ASP.NET custom error page and end up going round in circles and tearing your hair out. Just strip everything out of the page that could possibly cause an error and test it.

Also with respect to 'customErrors' being ON or OFF there are several contributing factors to whether or not the friendly error page (your Errors.aspx) page will be shown or not.

See this blog (except below)

HttpContext.IsCustomErrorEnabled - looks at three different sources

1. The web.config's section's retail property. This is a useful property to set when deploying your application to a production server. This overrides any other settings for custom errors.
2. The web.config's section's mode property. This setting indicates whether custom errors are enabled at all, and if so whether they are enabled only for remote requests.
3. The HttpRequest object's IsLocal property. If custom errors are enabled only for remote requests, you need to know whether the request is from a remote computer.

The idea here is that you can have 'customErrors' turned OFF during development - when you do want to see the errors, and then enable it for production only.

This MSDN article discusses the attribute further.