Detecting Server.Transfer

How do you know when a page is being rendered as the result of a Server.Transfer, rather than a Response.Redirect or the user browsing directly to a page?

Actually it’s quite easy, assuming you’re using the default ASP.NET pipeline. In reality the “thing” that is responsible for handling an HTTP request is aptly called an HttpHandler – that is, they implement the IHttpHandler interface. Of course, you can create your own handlers if you just want to return a document, or your own manually rendered content, or similar.

But... the Page class also implements IHttpHandler, and ASP.NET therefore uses some cleverness to work out which page should be rendered, and then uses an instance of that Page-derived class as the HttpHandler.

So the bottom line is that if you do a Server.Transfer, the HttpHandler for the request will be the page that was originally being rendered... Therefore, the following code when executed from within a page will display “true” if a Server.Transfer has occurred;

TransferredLabel.Text = (Context.Handler != this).ToString();

Easy huh? Try the attached if you want to see this in action.

Originally posted by Simon Ince on 13 July 2009 here.