Error while deploying

Question

I am getting the following error while deploying the web application

Server Error in '/FormRelease' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Runtime Error 
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine. 

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".


<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <customErrors mode="Off"/>
    </system.web>
</configuration>


Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.


<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->

<configuration>
    <system.web>
        <customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
    </system.web>
</configuration>

Please help me !

Answer 1

To avoid seeing useless error messages like the one you posted, I use an errorlog database table and additional exception handlers. In general, when an exception occurs, I catch the error, write the error to the error log and then just reraise it to let the system handle it further. Then, when I receive an errorpage like this one, I can check the error log for possible exceptions.

In this case, I suspect that it's a configuration error, though. So it's likely that the system did not even manage to get inside your code or possibly the exception handling itself would fail too, simply because it can't connect to the database.

Possible causes: no access rights to the database, missing modules, invalid configuration, not enough access rights, routing errors, application not set in IIS and many, many other possibilities. To solve these errors and to prevent this happening in a production environment, always deploy to a test environment first, so you can check for any errors and other problems.

As Joel Coehoorn commented, adjust web.config first. But additionally, deploy the web application to a local, clean test environment first! Then you can more easily check any problems without disturbing the production environment. (Use a virtual machine if you can't afford a second test system.)