ASP.NET MVC Intentional Ajax Failure

I am making an ajax call to my controller which is going to perform a long operation. The operation can fail for many reasons or succeed. If I want to force the 开发者_运维百科failure code of my ajax call to execute ("error"), what do I need to do in my controller before returning? Just throw an exception?

Throwing an exception will lead to status code = 500 which will invoke the error handler, so it should be enough.