Skip to Main Content
Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition
book

Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

by Dan Maharry, Dan Hurwitz, Jesse Liberty
October 2008
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
1166 pages
28h 31m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

Custom Error Pages

To intercept an error in a page before it has a chance to send the generic error page to the client, you can make changes on an application-wide basis by adding error-handling settings in web.config, the site’s configuration file. Indeed, a newly generated web.config file has its <customErrors> section, wherein error handling is configured and commented out, so none is configured at all.

A yellow screen of death

Figure 19-24. A yellow screen of death

<configuration>
   <system.web>
      <!--
      <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly"
         defaultRedirect="GenericErrorPage.htm">
         <error statusCode="403" redirect="NoAccess.htm" />
         <error statusCode="404" redirect="FileNotFound.htm" />
      </customErrors>
      -->
   </system.web>
</configuration>

There are two possible attributes for the <customErrors> section:

  • defaultRedirect is a text string that contains the URL of the page to display in the case of any error not otherwise handled. Or rather, the URL for your own generic yellow screen of death. The example in web.config is GenericErrorPage.htm, which would be contained in the same application virtual root directory. If the custom error page to be displayed is not in the application virtual root, you need to include either a relative or a fully qualified URL in the defaultRedirect attribute.

  • mode is an attribute that enables or disables custom error pages for the application. It can have three possible values:

On

Enables custom errors ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5

Programming Microsoft® ASP.NET 3.5

Dino Esposito
Learning ASP.NET 3.5, 2nd Edition

Learning ASP.NET 3.5, 2nd Edition

Brian MacDonald, Dan Hurwitz, Jesse Liberty
Pro ASP.Net 4 in C# 2010

Pro ASP.Net 4 in C# 2010

Matthew MacDonald, Adam Freeman, Mario Szpuszta
Programming .NET 3.5

Programming .NET 3.5

Jesse Liberty, Alex Horovitz

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596156657Supplemental ContentErrata Page