Dariusz - if I’m not mistaken, QueryDistinctAccess works only on a page that exist and one that you’ve already Getpage()-ed - and then, the solution for page that has been deleted form the system is outstanding from it. What I’m thinking of would be a simple extension to ACL indeed that could even be static but would accept a page reference in addition to SID and AccessControlList.NoAccess.

GetPage is really heavy for a way to query a page access - I’m currently evaluating an EpiServer project that nearly failed performacne wise and we-ve just profiled it and the poor performance is mostly attributed to an excessive GetPage() calls that are taking up to 75% of whole CPU time spent within the application.

For the PageNotFoundException exception, there really is no other way to do this, as far as I know. We have what we think is a valid PageReference, but it is in fact not. I guess the API could return null for doing a GetPage on a non existing page, but these references are scattered around in markup and code, and the PageNotFoundException is a better error to show than the NullReferenceException on the first line that was actually trying to use the null’ed PageData object you just recieved. :-)

If you want to check if the user has access to the page, you will need to load it using the GetPage overload in the DataFactory:
PageData pd = Global.EPDataFactory.GetPage(myRef, AccessControlList.NoAccess);
This code gets the page, without checking the security (I know, it is a bad enum name, read it as “NoAccessCheck” to remember the difference.)

Then you can check the access right by looking at the ACL property (and its Query methods.)

To my defence (I wrote the code above) I did not really care what access rights the user have on that page. If she cannot see it, I’m skipping it. Checking the rights means I have to load it into memory anyway, and the cost of an exception in contrast to that can be ignored.