Easily returning the HTTP 403 Unauthorized status code from your ASP.NET MVC application

Sometimes, you might wish to make certain views or action methods hidden from the user, based on their credentials. ASP.NET MVC already has the built-in AuthorizeAttribute for this purposes, but sometimes, you might need something more fine-grained.

The easily return the HTTP 403 Unauthorized status code from your MVC controller action method, you can use the HttpUnauthorizedResult class.

Here's an example on the usage:

public ActionResult MyActionMethod(string id)
{
    bool canShowView = ...some logic here...;

    if (canShowView)
    {
        return View();
    }
    else
    {
        return new HttpUnauthorizedResult();
    }
}

Note that in case you want to return the HTTP 404 Not Found status code instead, you can use the controller method HttpNotFound like this:

return HttpNotFound();

Hope this helps!