I like to raise 404 with some error message at different places in the script eg: Http404(\"some error msg: %s\" %msg) So, in my urls.py I included:
Http404(\"some error msg: %s\" %msg)
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if you want to raise some sort of static messages for a particular view , you can do as follows:-
from django.http import Http404 def my_view(request): raise Http404("The link seems to be broken")