Question

Is there any way to map an exception to an HttpResponse object in django?

For example, I would like to map my own “UnauthorizedException” to an HttpResponseForbidden response object so when my view raises that exception, rather than automatically getting mapped to a 500, certain exceptions could be treated as 401.

Answer 1

You can, if you implement your own middleware that implements the process_exception method. A quick example:

from django.http import HttpResponseForbidden
from app.exceptions import UnauthorizedException


class UnauthorizedAccessMiddleware(object):
    def process_exception(self, request, exception):
        if isinstance(exception, UnauthorizedException):
           return HttpResponseForbidden("You are not authorized to access that page.")