How do I return NotFound() IHttpActionResult with an error message or exception?

Question

I am returning a NotFound IHttpActionResult, when something is not found in my WebApi GET action. Along with this response, I want to send a custom message and/or the exception message (if any). The current ApiController's NotFound() method does not provide an overload to pass a message.

Is there any way of doing this? or I will have to write my own custom IHttpActionResult?

Answer 1

Here's a one-liner for returning a IHttpActionResult NotFound with a simple message:

return Content(HttpStatusCode.NotFound, "Foo does not exist.");

Answer 2

You'd need to write your own action result if you want to customize the response message shape.

We wanted to provide the most common response message shapes out of the box for things like simple empty 404s, but we also wanted to keep these results as simple as possible; one of the main advantages of using action results is that it makes your action method much easier to unit test. The more properties we put on action results, the more things your unit test needs to consider to make sure the action method is doing what you'd expect.

I often want the ability to provide a custom message as well, so feel free to log a bug for us to consider supporting that action result in a future release: https://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/workitem/list/advanced

One nice thing about action results, though, is that you can always write your own fairly easily if you want to do something slightly different. Here's how you might do it in your case (assuming you want the error message in text/plain; if you want JSON, you'd do something slightly different with the content):

public class NotFoundTextPlainActionResult : IHttpActionResult
{
    public NotFoundTextPlainActionResult(string message, HttpRequestMessage request)
    {
        if (message == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("message");
        }

        if (request == null)
        {
            throw new ArgumentNullException("request");
        }

        Message = message;
        Request = request;
    }

    public string Message { get; private set; }

    public HttpRequestMessage Request { get; private set; }

    public Task<HttpResponseMessage> ExecuteAsync(CancellationToken cancellationToken)
    {
        return Task.FromResult(Execute());
    }

    public HttpResponseMessage Execute()
    {
        HttpResponseMessage response = new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.NotFound);
        response.Content = new StringContent(Message); // Put the message in the response body (text/plain content).
        response.RequestMessage = Request;
        return response;
    }
}

public static class ApiControllerExtensions
{
    public static NotFoundTextPlainActionResult NotFound(this ApiController controller, string message)
    {
        return new NotFoundTextPlainActionResult(message, controller.Request);
    }
}

Then, in your action method, you can just do something like this:

public class TestController : ApiController
{
    public IHttpActionResult Get()
    {
        return this.NotFound("These are not the droids you're looking for.");
    }
}

If you used a custom controller base class (instead of directly inheriting from ApiController), you could also eliminate the "this." part (which is unfortunately required when calling an extension method):

public class CustomApiController : ApiController
{
    protected NotFoundTextPlainActionResult NotFound(string message)
    {
        return new NotFoundTextPlainActionResult(message, Request);
    }
}

public class TestController : CustomApiController
{
    public IHttpActionResult Get()
    {
        return NotFound("These are not the droids you're looking for.");
    }
}

Answer 3

You could use ResponseMessageResult if you like:

var myCustomMessage = "your custom message which would be sent as a content-negotiated response"; 
return ResponseMessage(
    Request.CreateResponse(
        HttpStatusCode.NotFound, 
        myCustomMessage
    )
);

yeah, if you need much shorter versions, then I guess you need to implement your custom action result.