How to get MVC action to return 404

Question

I have an action that takes in a string that is used to retrieve some data. If this string results in no data being returned (maybe because it has been deleted), I want to return a 404 and display an error page.

I currently just use return a special view that display a friendly error message specific to this action saying that the item was not found. This works fine, but would ideally like to return a 404 status code so search engines know that this content no longer exists and can remove it from the search results.

What is the best way to go about this?

Is it as simple as setting Response.StatusCode = 404?

Answer 1

There are multiple ways to do it,

1. You are right in common aspx code it can be assigned in your specified way
2. throw new HttpException(404, "Some description");

Answer 2

I use:

Response.Status = "404 NotFound";

This works for me :-)

Answer 3

In NerdDinner eg. Try it

public ActionResult Details(int? id) {
    if (id == null) {
        return new FileNotFoundResult { Message = "No Dinner found due to invalid dinner id" };
    }
    ...
}