The generally-recommended best practice for exception handling within Web API is to to use exception filters.  Once registered, these classes sit in the processing pipeline for a message and can react to exceptions that are thrown by actions.

A Problem

The issue with the statement above is the qualifier “by actions”.  While an exception filter will correctly handle any errors thrown from within an action method, it will be bypassed by exceptions thrown during the creation of the controller.

These exceptions include two categories of error: exceptions thrown from within the controller constructor, and a failure to locate or invoke an appropriate constructor.  The latter problem is, for me, the more common – I use the Autofac MVC & WebAPI integrations (highly recommended, by the way) to handle dependency injection in controllers, and there are quite often scenarios where one of the dependencies is not available.  In these cases I really need a way to catch and to nicely handle those exceptions.

One way in which we can achieve this lofty aim is by creating a custom implementation of IHttpControllerActivator.

The Controller Activator

The IHttpControllerActivator interface only contains one method:

IHttpController Create(
  HttpRequestMessage request,
  HttpControllerDescriptor controllerDescriptor,
  Type controllerType
)

This method is responsible for creating and returning an instance of a specified controller before the API action is invoked.  This is perfect for our scenario because it is a very specific responsibility; we need a custom implementation, but we will not have to worry about how the controller type is selected, how the action is selected or how it is invoked.

Implementing a Decorator

To be honest, we don’t really want to get into how the controller is actually created – we just want to wrap it in a try { … } catch { … } – so instead of creating our own activator we should just write a decorator pattern to wrap the existing implementation.

public class ExceptionHandlingControllerActivator : IHttpControllerActivator
{
  private IHttpControllerActivator _concreteActivator;

  public ExceptionHandlingControllerActivator(IHttpControllerActivator concreteActivator)
  {
    _concreteActivator = concreteActivator;
  }

  public IHttpController Create(HttpRequestMessage request, HttpControllerDescriptor controllerDescriptor, Type controllerType)
  {
    try
    {
      return _concreteActivator.Create(request, controllerDescriptor, controllerType);
    }
    catch
    {
      //custom handler logic here
    }
  }
}

This simple class constructs on a concrete instance of IHttpControllerActivator, then calls down to that concrete instance within a try/catch block.  We can then implement our custom exception handling in the catch.

Now all we need to do is replace the default activator with our one.

Hooking It Up

We need to tell Web API to use our new controller activator instead of the default, and (as with so much else in Web API) we do this through the HttpConfiguration object; specifically, the Services property.

This comes with a convenient Replace method that allows us to insert our implementation in place of the default version.  We also want to pass that default into the constructor of our class, so we end up with something like this:

GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services.Replace(typeof(IHttpControllerActivator),
  new ExceptionHandlingControllerActivator(
    GlobalConfiguration.Configuration.Services.GetHttpControllerActivator()
  )
);

It looks a little messy, but it’s not complicated: grab a reference to the current activator, pass it into our decorator, then pass that into the Replace method.

Simple!