ASP.NET Web API : Correct way to return a 401/unauthorised response

Question

I have an MVC webapi site that uses OAuth/token authentication to authenticate requests. All the relevant controllers have the right attributes, and authentication is working ok.

The problem is that not all of the request can be authorised in the scope of an attribute - some authorisation checks have to be performed in code that is called by controller methods - what is the correct way to return a 401 unauthorised response in this case?

I have tried throw new HttpException(401, "Unauthorized access");, but when I do this the response status code is 500 and I get also get a stack trace. Even in our logging DelegatingHandler we can see that the response is 500, not 401.

Answer 1

You should be throwing a HttpResponseException from your API method, not HttpException:

throw new HttpResponseException(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); 

Or, if you want to supply a custom message:

var msg = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized) { ReasonPhrase = "Oops!!!" }; throw new HttpResponseException(msg); 

Answer 2

Just return the following:

return Unauthorized();