Custom 404 Pages

Question

I have followed Microsoft's instructions for custom 404 pages in SharePoint by setting the web application's FileNotFoundPage property. I am now still getting a 404 error if someone types a site collection name incorectly. For example if the user goes to sharepoint/sites/test and "test" is not a site collection then they will still get a 404 error. I have tried catching this with a httpModule also, but it looks like the request is returing a 200 code instead of a 404.

Several of the blogs mention this same problem but I have not seen any solution for it.

"* This seems to be working within a site collection context only, i.e. http://MyMOSSServer/sites/siteA if sites is a wildcard inclusion managed path and siteA doesn't exist in MOSS then this URL will NOT trigger the custom 404 error page set to SPWebApplication.FileNotFoundPage property."

Thanks,

Answer 1

As far as I know this is a design limitation in MOSS. I tried to do this myself a year or so ago and didn't identify a resolution at the time for showing a custom 404 if an invalid site collection name is specified.

Please see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/941329:

"Note Because of a design limitation, the custom 404 error Web page does not work when you access invalid site collections."

Answer 2

Perhaps this blog post at SharepointBlues.com might be helpful. (Full disclosure: I work at Sininen Meteoriitti, the company that employs the bloggers at Sharepoint Blues :-))

[edit]

Eh, upon further inspection, it looks unlikely that this would actually work for 404 errors. My bad. >_<

Answer 3

I don't know if it's gonna be of any help, but if you're running IIS 7 you should check out Sites\Sharepoint - 80\ and then ".NET Error Pages" or "Error Pages"