Question

I brand new to ASP.NET MVC3. How would I create a global custom error page for MVC3? The general idea is when an exception is thrown it would show a generic message to the user and it would log the exception to a database for developers to investigate later.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Here is what I ended up doing in global.asax.cs:

    protected void Application_Error()
    {
        var exception = Server.GetLastError();

        Log.Error("Exception", exception);

        var httpException = exception as HttpException;
        Response.Clear();
        Server.ClearError();
        var routeData = new RouteData();
        routeData.Values["controller"] = "Error";
        routeData.Values["action"] = "General";
        routeData.Values["exception"] = exception;
        Response.StatusCode = 500;
        if (httpException != null)
        {
            Response.StatusCode = httpException.GetHttpCode();
            switch (Response.StatusCode)
            {
                case 403:
                    routeData.Values["action"] = "Http403";
                    break;
                case 404:
                    routeData.Values["action"] = "Http404";
                    break;
            }
        }

        IController errorsController = new ErrorController();
        var rc = new RequestContext(new HttpContextWrapper(Context), routeData);
        errorsController.Execute(rc);
    }

Answer 1

In your Global.asax file implement the Application_Error method:

    protected void Application_Error() { 
        HttpContext ctx = HttpContext.Current; 
        var error = ctx.Server.GetLastError();
        ctx.Response.Clear(); 
        ctx.Response.End(); 
    }

Following up on Maess’ comment:

Read this: Error Handling in asp.net mvc 3