Question

When going to on object’s show page with an id that doesn’t exist, the RecordNotFonud exception is thown. Is there a way I can redirect to some error page, or maybe a different action when this error is thrown?

Answer 1

You may use rescue_from if you are using Rails 3:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  rescue_from ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, :with => :render_404

  def render_404
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html { render :action => "errors/404.html.erb", :status => 404 }
      # and so on..
    end
  end
end

Yes, you can also do a redirect instead of render, but this is not a good idea. Any semi-automatic interaction with your site will think that the transfer was successfull (because the returned code was not 404), but the received resource was not the one your client wanted.