ASP.NET 4 Unleashed

Handling UpdatePanel Errors Gracefully

Sometimes things go terribly wrong. The Internet gets clogged, an application’s database server goes down, and so on. How do you recover from these types of errors gracefully in an Ajax application?

By default, if an error occurs during an asynchronous postback, a JavaScript alert box appears that displays an error message. This is a jarring experience in a production application.

You have several options for avoiding this default experience: You can configure a custom error page; you can handle the error on the server side; or you can handle the error on the client side. Let’s examine each of these options.

First, if you configure a custom error page for your application, by default the custom error page ...