Question

I have a UsersController, with OnException (which works), but if I make the Controller inherit from BaseController, the OnException doesn’t work, even if I put it in the BaseController.

Basically I want to have all my controllers inherit from BaseController so I can just have one OnException handler there, which catches everything…

Answer 1

You don’t need to inherit from a custom base controller class in order to have all controllers handle exceptions the same way. You can do it with an ActionFilter.

[AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class | AttributeTargets.Method, 
    AllowMultiple = true, Inherited = true)]
public class CustomHandleErrorAttribute : HandleErrorAttribute
{
    public override void OnException(ExceptionContext context)
    {
        // do custom exception handling here
        // to return View("Error"), you can just do this:
        context.Result = new ViewResult { ViewName = "Error" };
    }
}

You can apply this to all of the controllers in your library with this Global.asax:

public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)
{
    //filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute()); // default MVC setting
    filters.Add(new CustomHandleErrorAttribute());
}