After recently launching a website, I had some built in error reporting in it. Starting seeing a few 'Thread is being Aborted' errors. I remembered dealing with this at my previous job and that it was related to the Response.Redirect call.
So hopefully with the help of a few of my readers we can put a list of issues related to the various calls that you can make to redirect a user to another page.
Response.Redirect
Response.Redirect was something I first used in classic ASP. now due to the nature of that platform I didn't see any issues with it. But in .NET its a different story. Microsoft gives us a few versions of this call.
1. Response.Redirect("URL") - The parameter is just the URL that you want the user sent to. Pretty strait forward.
2. Response.Redirect("URL", true/false) - The second parameter is what causes the error above. By default version one of this call sets the second parameter to true. However what that does is 'abort the thread' so as your page goes down to the next call it will see that the page is being aborted. By setting this to false, you fix the issue. However this is not idea because by setting it to true you are getting a bit more overhead on your HTTP traffic because you are telling the server to continue the request. Even though you have moved on.
Server.Transfer
Server.Transfer is a lot like Response.Redirect in that you have two versions to call.
1. Server.Transfer("URL")
2. Server.Transfer("URL", True/False) - The second parameter determines whether or not you can use the objects (like text boxes) on the original page. If it is set to true, you can use the objects. If it is set to false, you can't. Those items expire when the new page loads.
Comparisons
Now from my reading there are a few other distinct differences between the two.
1. Response.Redirect allows you to redirect to pages external to your site. The Server.Transfer HAS to be on your server.
2. Server.Transfer is just like Response.Redirect with a true passed in. Except it doesn't throw the original error. This allows you to save server resources as you transfer from page to page.
Well do you have anything to add? Did I miss anything?
HT: Microsoft
HT: Karl Moore