404 not working as expected

Question

I'm having trouble getting 404 pages to work. In Global Template Preferences I've set strict urls to yes (tried No as well) and have selected my 404 template.

My code on a single entry page is as follows.

{exp:channel:entries channel="services" disable="member_data|pagination|category_fields" limit="1" require_entry="yes"}

{if no_results}
    {redirect="404"}
{/if}

more code here
{/exp:channel:entries}

As far as I can tell this should go to a 404 page if I change the url to a non-existing url_title in the final segment. What happens instead is the page displays including header, footer and sidebar, but the content is empty.

any ideas?

--UPDATE-- full template code is in a pastie here.

Answer 1

You'll need {if switchee_no_results}{redirect="404"}{/if} if nested inside switchee, due to switchee's parse="inward"

Answer 2

If you remove the {redirect="404"} from the conditional, and instead put something like 'no content' - does it show that?

whats the template group/page structure look like? I'm assuming you've got a 'services.group' and then servicing this code from an index.html (which is as I understand strict urls should work).

Answer 3

I had this problem and was getting a blank white page in some but not all instances. My 404 uses an entry so the client can modify the 404 message - so my 404 consisted of an entries tag pulling in a specific entry_id. Because the 404 might be invoked from anywhere else on the site, its entries tag was being confused by unexpected URL segments, so it needed the dynamic="off" parameter.