Question

I want to handle uncaught exceptions in my ASP.NET MVC 3 application, so that I may communicate the error to the user via the application’s error view. How do I intercept uncaught exceptions? I’d like to be able to do this globally, not for each controller (although I wouldn’t mind knowing how to do this as well).

Answer 1

You can set up a global error filter in Global.asax

public static void RegisterGlobalFilters(GlobalFilterCollection filters)
{
    filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute());
}

The above sets up a default error handler which directs all exceptions to the standard error View. The error view is typed to a System.Web.Mvc.HandleErrorInfo model object which exposes the exception details.

You also need to turn on custom errors in the web.config to see this on your local machine.

<customErrors mode="On"/>

You can also define multiple filters for specific error types:

filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute
{
    ExceptionType = typeof(SqlException),
    View = "DatabaseError",
    Order = 1
});

/* ...other error type handlers here */

filters.Add(new HandleErrorAttribute()); // default handler

Note that HandleErrorAttribute will only handle errors that happen inside of the MVC pipeline (i.e. 500 errors).