Currently using DNN 5.2.x and we are using only 1 portal on the site. We need to make a mobile version of the portal and eliminate most of the extra DNN stuff as info will be just displayed. So what we decided to do was create seperate ASP.NET Web Forms website and utilize the DNN providers (membership, roles, etc) to do the logging in. However we are currently having issues. The one in particular is ("unknown exception trying to write to log"). We've moved most of the DNN Global.asax (i.e. SimpleContainer instructions) file to the new website and added the necessary web.config sections and references however we get this error when a user logs in. We did copy over the same web.config machine key to the new website. The connection strings are also there (app settings and connection string sections and is named SiteSqlServer).
So my question is, has anyone created a new website around DNN without using DNN except for the membership? i.e. no modules, no skins, etc. Just validate user and get roles.
If you have what needs to be done to get DNN 5.2.x (or later) to log a user in and return the roles, could you post your steps?
The default DNN login is based on ASP.NET membership. If all you really want is the login feature, it will be MUCH MUCH easier to simply use the ASP.NET membership directly than try to rip it out of DNN.
What you are trying is not impossible, but certainly will require substantial patience with trial and error.
For only validation users and getting roles you could write your own simple providers that utilize dnn special tables in the databse like (Users, Roles, UserRoles, Profile etc). The table User is associated with the aspnet_Membership and aspnet_Users standard tables via the Username field.
There are many options which are open for you.
If you really don't want to digg into complecations of how to integrate the dnn membership and role provider will work, you can check dnn single sign on
Another option is to have your webforms application as a subfolder in your dnn website. that way you don't have to do much effort and you will have all the good things ready to get started. even you can directly convert your skin to master page and reuse almost all the css and image related suff
In addition to above, I also suggest another smart way to do this. Since you are considering a mobile site, why don't you try and detect the browser using Request.Browser and create a separate skin for dnn that is of smaller size. We can easily switch skins dynamically for service requests.
I hope this will help. If you have more questions regarding this, I will be happy to help. Just drop me and email and I will try to help you get as close as possible to get you going.
Good Luck
This is the route we took. We basically implemented DNN in the mobile version of the website. Except we only utilized the User Membership features of DNN. To do this we had to use all the same core DNN dll's and also include all the "bootup" features in the global.asax file. We also had to on every request inject a UserInfo object into the session context. I forget the key name for the UserInfo oject used but it is used by DNN and must be set in a DNN handler that we did not incorporate. Other than that it works perfectly. We have the ability to get all the roles a user is in and etc.
Related
For my new website, I am using a custom login.aspx (simply two text boxes username and password with a button). Actually I don't know about authentication modes in ASP.NET. Do I need to specify any mode in my web.config?
What are the security issues related to this?
Any links to articles related to this will be appreciated.
Have a look at ASP.NET Identity. This is the way to handle authentication/authorization in ASP.NET these days.
Start reading the introduction on the asp.net site and a lot of thing will become clear.
Just a login.aspx page will bring you nothing, since there's a lot more involved then just username/password checking. You need to store usernames/passwords, encrypt things, handle cookies (persistent or not), handle autorization, maybe some registration or roles etc etc.
All this things can be done with ASP.NET identity. If it's a new website, in VS2013, Individual User Accounts authentication is on by default when creating a new ASP.NET web project. There's a lot of boilerplate code in the project template to get you up and running...
http://asp.net/identity
Anyway thanks for your suggestion. I am using 'Scrypt' based hashing. Form authentication seems easy but its difficult for me to manage cookies, user tables etc. I use User table for many other purpose also.
This method gives me a good control over everything even if its difficult to get coded.
I am just learning the admin side of this in the Web Site Administration Tool, having set up a new project. I have accessed the security panel at the back end, and created an admin role, which is used to access a view through a controller filter. All standard stuff.
However when I try to log in to the front end with this user, it doesn't exist, and I have to create it afresh.
Alternatively when I create a user at the front end, and try to assign him an admin role at the back end it he also doesn't exist.
Only users created at the back end, exist at the back end and can be assigned roles
There seems to be no connection between front end users and back end users. There appears to be two separate databases one holding front end users and one back end users.
Giving a backend user admin rights doesn't seem to work from the front end.
is there some explanation on how this system work around? I have used google without help.
If you're using a standard asp.net mvc 4 application, then yes. This is to be expected.
The reason is that MVC4 by default users a different membership provider called SimpleMembership, and this provider is not compatible with the ASP.NET Configuration utility. That configuration utility uses the old membership provider, which has entirely different tables.
Your options are:
don't use the web configuration utility. Add users manually, or through a script, or maybe create your own admin pages.
Disable simple membership so that MVC uses the old membership system
do something completely different (don't use membership, use a different provider, create your own provider, etc...)
As for a separate database, yes. If you notice, there is no membership configuration in your web.config. Instead, the ASP.NET Congifuration utility uses the default membership configuration that's defined in your machine.config in c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework[64]\config. the default location is a file located in your project directory under the App_Data directory called aspnet.mdf
EDIT:
More information about the new provider here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jgalloway/archive/2012/08/29/simplemembership-membership-providers-universal-providers-and-the-new-asp-net-4-5-web-forms-and-asp-net-mvc-4-templates.aspx
Also:
http://geekswithblogs.net/Aligned/archive/2012/08/30/mvc-4-authentication.aspx
I'm currently developing a website using Visual Studio 2010. As you all might know, creating a new website here automatically adds an Account folder which contains webpages like Login.aspx, etc. I am implementing this Login.aspx which contains the ASP.NET Login control. It's now functioning the way it should but I have a few concerns.
Before, I used to create my own UI for the log-in so managing sessions is not a problem to me. But since i'm currently using the Login.aspx which has a CS file almost empty, i don't have an idea where I can start implementing my session. Meaning to say, I don't know how to check programatically if the user has been successfully logged in so I can start implementing my session.
I would very much appreciate any pointer regarding this matter.
Thanks in advance. :)
You could subscribe for the Authenticate event and perform some custom authentication logic. Also you may take a look at the following article.
There are events associate with ASP.NET Login Control that you can use to create session like OnLoggingIn. Moreover you can find more about user validation from here Validating User Credentials Against the Membership
I'm working on adding a new webapp to an existing website. I've been directed to write the webapp in ASP.NET. The existing website is written in ColdFusion. For the most part, the ASP.NET webapp is completely stand-alone, but it needs to interact with the ColdFusion code in one important way - if somebody logs in to the ColdFusion site, we don't want them to have to log in again when visiting an ASP.NET page.
When someone logs in to the ColdFusion site, their username is stored in a cookie, along with a login token that can be looked up in our database. My .NET is a little rusty, so I'm having trouble visualizing how the ASP.NET code should use this data. I've already written a simple MembershipProvider that can be used to log in/out out the ASP.NET app using the data in our existing database tables, which are shared with the ColdFusion code.
What I'd like to know is - how can I make sure the ASP.NET app detects the cookies set by the ColdFusion app (I imagine they'd be sent to the ASP.NET pages, since everything is hosted on one domain), and automatically logs the user in using the MembershipProvider and Forms Authentication, using the credentials supplied in the cookie? I'm thinking that putting some kind of cookie check and log in function in the Global.asax file, set to run every page load for every page... but that seems kind of clunky. Also, do people still use the Global.asax file anyway? I had thought there was a more modern method.... Also, how can I manually log someone in using Forms Authentication and a custom membership provider? Currently my code allows the user to log in using the provided login control, but I'm not sure how to log the user in without them having to do anything.
Thanks in advance for any help. Looking over the MembershipProvider tutorials and the MSDN documentation it seems to me like the answer should be staring me in the face, but for some reason I just can't see it. Maybe not enough coffee....
Not sure if this is what you're looking for:
FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie("the username goes here",false);
Reference
I'm a CF developer ususally, but we had to do some integration with a .NET application recently and the way we approached it was to keep the CF and .NET sessions separate but ensure that login happened on both so when the user moved from one to the other they were still logged in.
So is there perhaps a way for you to hit your ASP.NET application with a request to login a user when you login using the CF application? Perhaps you could have an iframe on the page that you can load when the CF login is complete that holds a login service for the .NET app?
This way you would not need to worry about one app server reading the other app server's cookies, instead there would be two sets of cookies, one for ASP and one for CF.
Hope that helps!
The way I would approach it, is I would have a specific page that acts as a liaison between the CF and .NET layer. That page would implement your business layer and just check to see if the Cookie is there, if so read it in, do the lookup and login the user or whatever business logic that needs to be done. How would you accomplish the login/authentication, well that’s all based on your login/authentication code.
The only link I can offer is the basic of cookies in ASP.net
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa289495(v=vs.71).aspx
Edit: found another link that might be helpful.
http://www.aspnettutorials.com/tutorials/network/cookies-csharp.aspx
I have been Googling a problem that I have with trying to integrate the web application that I am working on with SharePoint 2010.
The web application is a wiki style tool that allows users to log in via forms authentication or WIA against Active Directory and create content for themselves and others.
What we would like to do is to allow a user have a page with the content they have created in our web application mixed in with content that they have living on the SharePoint server. For example, they may want to see a list of documents that they have on the SharePoint server mixed in with some of their content.
To accomplish this, we would like to take the credentials the user has logged into our web application with (for example MYDOMAIN\jsmith) and be able to query SharePoint for the documents of that same user (MYDOMAIN\jsmith) WITHOUT the user being prompted to re-enter their credentials to access the SharePoint server (we are trying to avoid the double-hop problem)
We have come up with some options for how we want to do this, but we are unsure of what the best approach is.
For example, we could
- Have a global user, shared by all users to get information we need from SharePoint. The downside is that we cannot filter SharePoint content to a particular user
- We could store the users credentials when they log in, but that would only work for users authenticating via forms auth and would be a security issue that some users/clients would not like
- Writing a SharePoint extension using WCF to allow us to access the information we need, however we'd still have the issue of figuring out how to impersonate the user we want.
Neither of these options are ideal and in our investigation we came across the Claims Authentication/STS option which seems like it is trying to solve the problem we are having.
So my question is, based on what I have written, is Claims/STS the best approach for us? We have not been able to find much direction on how to use this method to call into SharePoint from a Web Application and pass along the existing credentials.
Does anyone have any experience with any of these issues?
It sounds like you may be overcomplicating the problem. The reason that the user gets asked for credentials twice is that the two parts of the system are on different servers. The easiest solution is probably to implement your custom web app as custom pages/web parts within SharePoint.
If that isn't an option, a smaller amount of code on the SharePoint server (maybe a custom web service) should give you a few more options for impersonating a particular user.