Handle MonoRail 404s gracefully

Archived Content

github.com/chadly

I need to display user-friendly 404 pages when a request is made for a controller that cannot be found. Monorail provides a built-in way to handle this. When faced with a request for a controller it cannot find, Monorail will look for a view named 404 in the rescues folder and render that. That is good enough for most people, I guess. It wasn’t good enough for me. I needed my 404 view to use a layout (dynamically chosen based on some configuration settings) and to display some data.

To give you an example of what I am talking about, consider an ecommerce site.  When someone requests a page that doesn’t exist, you would want to show them a friendly error page that shows some featured products - some products that the user might be interested in. We don’t want to turn the user away or show a sparsely populated page when our poor, unsuspecting user types a wrong URL.

First of all, I set out to use a custom rescue controller to solve all my problems.  Here is the relevant code:

[Layout("Default")]
public class RescueController : SmartDispatcherController, IRescueController
{
    public void Rescue(Exception exception, IController controller, IControllerContext controllerContext)
    {
        if (Is404(exception))
        {
            Handle404();
            return;
        }
 
        RenderSharedView("rescues\general", true);
    }
 
    private bool Is404(Exception ex)
    {
        var httpEx = ex as HttpException;
        var mrEx = ex as MonoRailException;
 
        return (httpEx != null && httpEx.GetHttpCode() == 404)
            || (mrEx != null && mrEx.HttpStatusCode.GetValueOrDefault() == 404);
    }
 
    public void Handle404()
    {
        BindFeaturedProductsToView();
 
        Response.StatusCode = 404;
        Response.StatusDescription = "Not found";
        RenderSharedView("rescues\404");
    }
 
    private void BindFeaturedProductsToView()
    {
        /* bind some data to the view here */
    }
}

I then append this little attribute to all of my controllers (or to the base class that all of my controllers inherit from - if you happen to have one of those…):

[Rescue(typeof(RescueController))]

That actually got me 90% of the way there. A request for an action that didn’t exist on any controller would now be handled by my custom RescueController which could attach a layout and bind any necessary data that the 404 view needs.

The Devil is in the Details

Back to the original problem of this post - I need to be able to show this same view (and render it with the same logic) when a request is made for a controller that does not exist. After digging through the Monorail source code a bit, and after a lot of trial and error, I eventually found a way to accomplish this. First of all, I had to make my Handle404 method on RescueController public so that it could be accessible via a URL. Then I ended up sub-classing MonoRailHttpHandlerFactory to handle the case of a missing controller.

public class CustomHttpHandlerFactory : MonoRailHttpHandlerFactory
{
    public override IHttpHandler GetHandler(HttpContext context, string requestType, string url, string pathTranslated)
    {
        IHttpHandler handler = base.GetHandler(context, requestType, url, pathTranslated);
 
        if (handler is NotFoundHandler)
        {
            //The default NotFoundHandler renders the 404 view in the
            //rescues folder if it finds one, otherwise it throws an exception.
            //We want to reuse our 404-handling logic in RescueController.
            context.RewritePath("~/rescue/handle404");
            return base.GetHandler(context, requestType, url, pathTranslated);
        }
 
        return handler;
    }
}

Note the use of context.RewritePath. This keeps the requested URL the same in the user’s browser and simply reroutes the request internally to our RescueController. We don’t want to just do a redirect to our RescueController as this would be very bad for SEO purposes. We want to send a 404 status code to the user when they request our missing page — we just want to do it in a user-friendly way.

Gotchas

Make sure you update your web.config to use this new handler instead of the default Monorail one. Also note that I am using routing to route /rescue/handle404 to the Handle404 action on RescueController.  If you were not using routing, you could change that URL to ~/rescue/handle404.castle or ~/rescue/handle404.rails depending on your configuration.  Overall, I like this solution very much. It is very DRY and accomplishes everything I wanted to accomplish.