ASP.NET 2.0 Multiple Membership Providers for Authentication

[Daniel]

Hi,

we are planing two use - if possible - two Membership Providers at the
same time for authentication within the same application.

Short background

Imagine a community page, such as a forum. It comes with its very own
membership provider given to us by our customer. We cannot change that
one. We just have to live with it. Their users are authenticated by
this provider and then allowed to use forums, eCards, etc.

Now, they want us to add a backend to their site. For that we need
another membership provider which will determine whether the user has
the rights needed to administer/change/add/delete certain pages/content
areas. As both - totally different user roles - need to work on the
same pages, we need a solution to implement two different
authentication schemes in the same application at the same time.

Is there a way to accomplish that and where would we start?

Thanks in advance,
Daniel

 

[Brock Allen]

You could always write your own provider and delegate to the right one, as
necessary.

 

[Daniel]

Hi,

You could always write your own provider and delegate to the right one, as
necessary.

thanks, however this is not quite the way we would like to go, as the
backend should be reusable with different front end. It wouldn't make
things easier to maintain a multitude of different interface adapters
for different customer solutions.

Thanks though,
Daniel

 

[Brock Allen]

Well, the provider infrastructure was designed to only work with one at a
time. If you need something else, then you're going to have to write code
to do that. You could build a custom provider that accepted configuration
information such that it dynamically delegated to other providers (as opposed
to hard coding which ones to use).

 

[MikeS]

Hi Brock,

Daniel is mentioning Membership (authentication) and Roles
(authorization). Two different animals as far as I now. Whatever.

So for a custom Auth Store Provider, we can pass in the providers
collection to the custom provider, so it has all of them at it's
fingertips to use, at application start from global, right?.

What could we then branch on in the custom provider to determine which
provider to pull out of the providers collection to use? If I had the
request in hand I could look at the resource being asked for and branch
on that I guess but I am not sure where is the right/safe place to grab
that.

Simply what I'd like to be able to do is use different auth store
providers for different sub directories so I can break up my AzMan
store into more managable seperate applications.

What I want is different then Daniel but with a custom provider like I
described, I think he could loop through the providers collection and
pull of all roles found for a user, concatenate them into a string
array and retrun them all.