404 Reloaded

One of my first articles on this site was about custom error pages in ASP.NET. To me error handling is a big and important deal. The article I pointed you to explains how to tackle this challenge from different angles. However, my own custom 404 has been too simple. If you mistyped a URL is simply said, Sorry, I cannot find the page you are looking for. This was a little better than a "white screen" but still not good enough.

I decided to put to good use my naming convention. I assign reference names to blog posts and articles in a way that reflect their titles. For example, the URL of Microsoft.com Redesign: The Final Frontier is

http://www.aspnetresources.com/blog/ms_redesign_final.aspx

In reality, there's no page with this URL. An HTTP module routes it to a page that figures out which blog post to display. Since URLs somewhat resemble post titles I decided to reuse them for the purposes of handling 404s.

I set up a Full-Text Search catalog which is heads and shoulders better that the traditional LIKE construct in T-SQL. Luckily, in ASP.NET the offending URL is passed to your custom 404 page.

..../PageNotFound.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/missing_page_goes_here.aspx

By parsing it and feeding it to the search the site can provide suggestions as to what you might've been looking for. If the search renders nothing you get:

I cannot find the page you are looking for. I ran a site-wide search but still found nothing. Please check the archives.

If some suggestions were found you get this message along with a list of suggested links:

I cannot find the page you are looking for. I ran a site-wide search and found some posts and articles you might find relevant.

If something really, really weird happens you will be greeted with the simple, I cannot find the page you are looking for.