HOWTO: Useful ASP page to return configurable HTTP Status codes

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Sometimes, you just want a simple test page on IIS to do some automated testing of your code that interacts with IIS. Here is another useful one in the series.

Question:

Hi,

I have some negative testing therefore need to have IIS to return 403, 404 or 500. How can I configure each? An automated way would be the best but manual is OK too.

Thanks,

Answer:

There are a couple of approaches to do this. You can either:

  1. Configure IIS to go down the actual custom error codepath to generate responses with those status codes
  2. Make a request to a URL that generates responses with those status codes

The former can be accomplished in the following manner:

  1. There are many types of 403s. For example, you can configure IIS to:
    • Disallow Read permissions and then try to access a resource handled by the Static File Handler.
    • Disallow Dir Browsing and make sure no file resource matches DefaultDoc and then make a request to "/"
    • Etc... just check out the 403*.htm custom error pages for ideas
  2. 404 can be generated by making a request to /NotExist.htm
  3. 500 can be generated by making a request to an ASP page with a syntax error (for example, just remove the %> tag of an ASP page

The latter is easier to configure/use and is shown as a code sample at the end of this blog entry. You just need to copy the ASP page to IIS, make sure ASP is enabled, and make a request to that ASP page with the correct querystring parameter. i.e.

/ResponseStatus.asp?status=403%20Test!

//David

 <%
DIM status
status = Request.QueryString( "status" )

IF NOT IsEmpty( status ) THEN
    Response.Status = status
END IF
%>