When no record associated with the given id, which action should the action method do? Returning NoFound view or redirecting to NoFound action method?

Question

In Details, Edit, Delete action methods we have id parameter to retrieve the corresponding record from the database.

If no record corresponds to the id, we have 2 choices:

The executing action method returns a specific view, which is usually named as NoFound.cshtml under Views\Shared directory, to inform the user that the id is not valid.

or

The executing action method redirect the user to a specific action method, for example public ActionResult NoFound (string message), to inform the user about the issue.

My question is: When no record associated with the given id, which action should the action method do? Returning NoFound view or redirecting to NoFound action method?

Edit 1 I need reasons from technical point of view such as security and performance.

score 9 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 17 '11 at 01:50

9

It's all personal preference. In my opinion though, the real thing that should happen in this situation is a 404 response code should be sent back to the client. You can have custom 404 pages that give you the best of both worlds.

answered Feb 17 '11 at 01:50

Matt Greer

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+1 Certainly for Details a 404 Not Found makes the most sense here. For Edit and Delete, I'm wavering between a 404 or possibly a 405 "Method Not Allowed" (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html#sec10.4.6) as you can't delete or edit a non-existent resource, but to adhere to the spec, you must send an Allows header with the allowed methods, so 404 might be more sensible. – Zhaph - Ben Duguid Mar 22 '11 at 17:24

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

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Refer to Step 5 on this answer - custom 404, proper 404 response code, proper handling of the "item not found" case.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:26

Community

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answered Mar 28 '11 at 04:32

Matt Kocaj

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 22 '11 at 09:24

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I would return a "Not found" view, because this way an URL with ID could be stored in favorites and will became valid when record with this ID will be available.

answered Mar 22 '11 at 09:24

Alexander Prokofyev

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 22 '11 at 21:50

I would recommend still returning a 404 error. The order of the parameters in the route is irrelevant, some people prefer {controller}/{action}/{id}, in some cases {controller}/{id}/{action} might make more sense. In either case if all three parameters are required for it to be considered a valid request and one is missing you should return a 404. It will also make testing your site much easier as if you return a view it will have a result code of 200 and make it much more difficult to track down broken links. 404 errors are universally recognized as a problem when doing site analysis.

When no record associated with the given id, which action should the action method do? Returning NoFound view or redirecting to NoFound action method?

4 Answers4