Throw error of 401 Unauthorized so Web.config shows appropriate page

Question

I'm making an ajax call and if the user is not an admin, i want to throw an error of type 401 - unauthorized and then let the web.config redirect the user to my access denied page:

    <customErrors mode="On">
  <error statusCode="500" redirect="~/InternalError.html"/>
  <error statusCode="401" redirect="~/AccessDenied.aspx"/>
</customErrors>

As you can see, i have a type 500 - internal server error to handle other errors. But when i run this code:

     if (user.Type != AppUser.UserType.SystemAdministrator)
            {
                throw new HttpException((int)HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized, "Unauthorized");
            }

web.config thinks a 500 is thrown and shows InternalError.htm instead of AccessDenied.aspx. How do i tell my ASP.NET application to throw a 401 instead of a 500, so the correct error page will be shown?

This is not MVC.

Answer 1

Set the Response.StatusCode instead and it will trigger the redirect.

Alternatively, you can use the below:

throw new HttpException(401, "Unauthorized");