ASPNET MVC IIS7 and Bad Request
Custom 404 handling working in Cassini but IIS7 returns Bad Request instead? Unlock the httpErrors config section with appcmd to fix it.
While working on an app recently I ran into the issue of needing to handle httpErrors at runtime in a dynamic fashion. I did this with some custom controller execution and routing.
If a user were to type in an invalid address a custom 404 would be returned.
Example: http://example.org/foo
The Problem
Unfortunately my custom error handling code was working in Cassini but in IIS7 it was not.
IIS 7 would return “Bad Request”. Here is how I fixed it.
The problem was that I was not telling IIS7 what to do with httpErrors.
The Fix
You can enable this by doing so in the web.config:
<system.webServer>
</system.webserver>
To use this option you will need to unlock this config section for IIS7. To do this, open the command prompt on the IIS7 box and execute the following command:
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe unlock config -section:system.webServer/httpErrors
or if you want to unlock the config section for just a particular site, execute this:
%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe unlock config “SiteName/app/url” -section:system.webServer/httpErrors
I was now able to handle the http errors returned from IIS7.
