How to have a custom 404 and 500 error pages with a stock standard ASP.NET MVC3 website?

Question

I'm trying to have 2 custom error pages in a stock sample ASP.NET MVC3 website.

Darin Dimitrov has a good SO answer here but it's not working for all my test conditions.

Then there is the widely popular How can I properly handle 404s in ASP.NET MVC? post .. but this just touches on a 404 error.

Can someone please explain what

• Routes
• web.config settings
• controllers / action methods

are required to do this very simple thing :(

Scenarios to accept this answer:

• VS2010 -> File -> New -> ASP.NET MVC3 project / Internet Application
• (Right Click on the solution).. -> Use IIS Express
• Error pages cannot be a static html page. They must be a page which I can pass info to, like any other view, etc. (eg. an ErrorController)...

and for the test routes...

• /Home/Index -> shows index page
• /Home -> shows index page
• / -> shows index page
• /Home/About -> shows about page
• /asdasd/asdsad/asdas/asddasd/adsad -> 404
• /adsa/asda/asd/asd/asd/asd -> 404
• /asdsadasda -> 404

then add this to the HomeController.cs class..

public ActionResult ThrowException()
{
    throw new NotImplementedException();
}

and now ..

• /home/throwexception -> 500 error

Cheers :)

BTW, some of those realy long routes (above) give really weird error pages right now, when using the stock standard new ASP.NET MVC3 template

Answer 1

I specify customErrors in my web.config file as below;

    <customErrors defaultRedirect="/Error/GeneralError" mode="On">
      <error statusCode="403" redirect="/Error/403" />
      <error statusCode="404" redirect="/Error/404" />
      <error statusCode="500" redirect="/Error/500" />
    </customErrors

I have a route in the Global.asax as below;

            /// Error Pages
            /// 
            routes.MapRoute(
                "Error", // Route name
                "Error/{errorCode}", // URL with parameters
                new { controller = "Page", action = "Error", errorCode= UrlParameter.Optional }
            );

The corresponding ActionResult does the following, which returns the relevant custom error page.

//
        public ActionResult Error(string errorCode)
        {
            var viewModel = new PageViewModel();

            int code = 0;
            int.TryParse(errorCode, out code);

            switch (code)
            {
                case 403:
                    viewModel.HtmlTitleTag = GlobalFunctions.FormatTitleTag("403 Forbidden");
                    return View("403", viewModel);
                case 404:
                    viewModel.HtmlTitleTag = GlobalFunctions.FormatTitleTag("404 Page Not Found");
                    return View("404", viewModel);
                case 500:
                     viewModel.HtmlTitleTag = GlobalFunctions.FormatTitleTag("500 Internal Server Error");
                    return View("500", viewModel);
                default:
                    viewModel.HtmlTitleTag = GlobalFunctions.FormatTitleTag("Embarrassing Error");
                    return View("GeneralError", viewModel);
            }
        }

This allows me to have many different custom error pages. It's maybe not the best or most elegant solution, but it certainly works for me.