Returning the appropriate HTTP Response Codes back from your web server is a very important best practice. Fortunately for .NET developers, Web API makes it very easy to use Exception Filters to return the appropriate response codes from your exceptions.
By implementing a custom ExceptionFilterAttribute you can generically create and return HttpResponseMessages for unhandled exceptions based on type. This is great in that you do not have to wrap all of your controller actions in try catch blocks to handle exceptions from other application layers.
Sample Controller
public class ValuesController : ApiController
{
public string Get(int id)
{
switch (id)
{
case 1:
throw new KeyNotFoundException("Hello World");
case 2:
throw new ArgumentException("Goodnight Moon");
default:
return "value";
}
}
}
