ViewStateException Class

If an exception occurs when the page loads the view-state information, the page creates a ViewStateException object and passes it as an inner exception within an HttpException exception. The HttpException exception is re-thrown to be handled by the application.

The ViewStateException class stores information about the exception in the Message property. If the request has permission to access the ServerVariables property, then the Message property contains the values returned from the RemoteAddress, RemotePort, UserAgent, PersistedState, Referer, and Path properties; otherwise, the Message property contains a generic view-state error message.

A view-state exception can be the result of a Message Authentication Codes (MAC) validation error. If the page attribute enableViewStateMac is set to true, view-state information is encoded with a MAC identifier. When the view-state information is posted back to the server, the page verifies the encoding to ensure that it has not been altered by the user. If the page cannot validate the MAC encoding on the view-state information, it will throw an HttpException exception with the ViewStateException object as an inner exception.

For MAC validation to succeed, the view-state information must be hashed by the same key when it is sent and received. Within a Web farm, the machine key on each server should be set to a common key.

The following code example demonstrates how to implement a method that deserializes a base64-encoded string and returns an ICollection collection of property settings. The Deserialize method can throw an HttpException exception that contains a ViewStateException object as an inner exception. The example shows how you can catch an HttpException exception and retrieve the properties from the ViewStateException object.

private ICollection LoadControlProperties(string serializedProperties)
{

    ICollection controlProperties = null;

    // Create an ObjectStateFormatter to deserialize the properties.
    ObjectStateFormatter formatter = new ObjectStateFormatter();

    try
    {
        // Call the Deserialize method.
        controlProperties = (ArrayList)formatter.Deserialize(serializedProperties);
    }
    catch (HttpException e)
    {
        ViewStateException vse = (ViewStateException)e.InnerException;
        String logMessage;

        logMessage = "ViewStateException. Path: " + vse.Path + Environment.NewLine;
        logMessage += "PersistedState: " + vse.PersistedState + Environment.NewLine;
        logMessage += "Referer: " + vse.Referer + Environment.NewLine;
        logMessage += "UserAgent: " + vse.UserAgent + Environment.NewLine;

        LogEvent(logMessage);

        if (vse.IsConnected)
        {
            HttpContext.Current.Response.Redirect("ErrorPage.aspx");
        }
        else
        {
            throw e;
        }
    }
    return controlProperties;
}

.NET Framework

Windows 7, Windows Vista SP1 or later, Windows XP SP3, Windows XP SP2 x64 Edition, Windows Server 2008 (Server Core not supported), Windows Server 2008 R2 (Server Core supported with SP1 or later), Windows Server 2003 SP2

Reference

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