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Error handling with WebHttpBinding and Microsoft Ajax

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Here I talked about a technique to convert SOAP faults into JSON objects for AJAX scenarios. The post was primarily around using WCF extensibility to send back exception details as JSON object with a particular HTTP status code. The code will only works with native XMLHttpRequest object or with a library which returns bare HTTP response (Ext JS, jQuery etc).

Microsoft AJAX library (generated JavaScript proxy) uses a well defined error format and will not understand the custom format I have used. So it will just ignore our custom error object and will return a generic error object to the onFailed callback.

For our server side extensibility feature to work with Microsoft AJAX library, we need to change our service's error format to match to the format expected by Microsoft AJAX library which can easily be modelled using following DataContract.

[DataContractFormat]

public class MicrosoftAjaxError

{

    [DataMember]

    public string Message { get; set; }

    [DataMember]

    public string ExceptionType { get; set; }

    [DataMember]

    public string StackTrace { get; set; }

}

Now from our handler, we need to send back an instance of MicrosoftAjaxError class rather than our own error object. Here is the modified ProvideFault method.

public void ProvideFault(

    Exception error, MessageVersion version, ref Message fault)

{

    if (error is FaultException)

    {

        // extract the our FaultContract object from the exception object.

        var detail = error.GetType().GetProperty("Detail").GetGetMethod().Invoke(error, null);

        var msErrObject = new MicrosoftAjaxError { Message = "Fault exception...", ExceptionType = detail.GetType().ToString(), StackTrace = error.StackTrace };

       

        // create a fault message containing our FaultContract object

        fault = Message.CreateMessage(version, "", msErrObject, new DataContractJsonSerializer(msErrObject.GetType()));

        // tell WCF to use JSON encoding rather than default XML

        var wbf = new WebBodyFormatMessageProperty(WebContentFormat.Json);

        fault.Properties.Add(WebBodyFormatMessageProperty.Name, wbf);

        var rmp = new HttpResponseMessageProperty();

       

        rmp.Headers[HttpResponseHeader.ContentType] = "application/json";

        rmp.Headers["jsonerror"] = "true";

        rmp.StatusCode = System.Net.HttpStatusCode.BadRequest;

        // put appropraite description here..

        rmp.StatusDescription = "See fault object for more information.";

        fault.Properties.Add(HttpResponseMessageProperty.Name, rmp);

    }

}

Originally posted by Zulfiqar on the 2nd of April 2009 here.