We have a site requiring users pay $2 to view the details of a record. We occasionally get complaints because we send them to the payment page, and once they pay it turns out the record isn't valid, or it was lost, or the data couldn't be generated. So we want to add in a check to ensure the page constructs properly before the user is required to pay for it. However, we don't want the user to have access to the page until they pay for it.
Is there anything in ASP.NET 3.5 or just general web design that would allow something like this? The data on the record is real time and computed on a backend server before sent to the client. Occasionally this computation fails for whatever reason.
Our alternative is to call all of the loading methods and validate the data, then redirect them to the payment page. The problem is A) this will be a relatively involved process rewriting all of these methods to return validation information, and B) it still doesn't guarentee us the page will load properly. Any thoughts?
