Question

I have a custom authorize attribute used for Ajax requests:

public class AjaxAuthorize : AuthorizeAttribute {
    protected override void HandleUnauthorizedRequest(AuthorizationContext filterContext) {
        UrlHelper urlHelper;

        if (filterContext.HttpContext.Request.IsAjaxRequest()) {
            urlHelper = new UrlHelper(filterContext.RequestContext);

            filterContext.HttpContext.Response.StatusCode = 401;
            //Return JSON which tells the client where the login page exists if the user wants to authenticate.
            filterContext.HttpContext.Response.Write(new JavaScriptSerializer().Serialize(
                new {
                    LoginUrl = string.Format("{0}?ReturnURL={1}", FormsAuthentication.LoginUrl, urlHelper.Encode(filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.PathAndQuery))
                }
            ));
            filterContext.HttpContext.Response.End();
        } else {
            base.HandleUnauthorizedRequest(filterContext);
        }
    }
}

When I run the application locally I get the JSON result back from the Ajax request. However, when I put the code on my beta server I end up getting the IIS 401 HTML response.

Does anyone see something wrong with my code that would make this work only on localhost? Additionally, if anyone has a better idea for returning the JSON result I am open to that as well.

Answer 1

There is some strange power of StackOverflow that results in the OP thinking through the question differently after posting. I’ll leave my answer here in hopes that it might benefit someone else.

It just occurred to me that IIS7 was getting in the way. I fixed this by adding one line of code:

filterContext.HttpContext.Response.TrySkipIisCustomErrors = true;