We want to offer some file storage capability in our asp.net 3.5 web app and would like users to create web folders by mapping to a particular URL [hosted on our IIS]. this will allow users to simply copy files from their systems to the mapped web folder and save them the task of uploading files, etc. Any ideas on how we can implement a webshare capability on webserver would be really appreciated.
What about FTP (FTPS)? In FTP Publishing service (ISS7 Extension) you can write your own authentication provider based on .NET Membership, or you can use same provider, which you are using in you web application. You can also extend the built-in functionality of this sevice to customize it's functions.
If you want to make an user interface in asp.net site, you can use System.IO classes to manage files.
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We are developing intranet base solution in ASP.NET MVC. It will be deployed across client's own internal network hence respective employee of client can use it.
As it is IIS based intranet application, one can easily copy files and configure IIS on other server. So what are the different solution available to prevent this.
Thank you in advance.
Generally when you are publishing the ASP.NET MVC web app, you can publish the version in dlls.
So Instead of creating a single Web App, you can create a new dll file where you are going to compile all the Models of the App and save it in a dll).
Then coming back to your original solution you will add the reference to this dll so no logic can be taken of your solution.
I have several asp.net website projects for various sites.
Currently I want to add REST API's to these projects so I can start developing mobile apps (using HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 and PhoneGap) that make use of these webservices.
Since WCF is far more powerful than regular asp.net webservices (among others with control over the service and authentication/authorization), I'd love to add these to my existing website project.
I did a Google search but cant find anywhere a step-by-step tutorial how this can be done. And also if there's any functionality I'd possibly loose when adding WCF functionality
I was also thinking of creating a new project specifically for WCF, but think I'd rather add it to an existing website project.
Can anyone help me with this?
Depending on exactly what your needs are and how your current web site is configured, there are two approaches.
If you are using a Web Site Project, then you should create your WCF service in a different application:
1) Create a new ASP.Net Web Application Project.
2) Add a new item to the project and select the type of WCF Service or WCF Data Service.
When you deploy this project, you will deploy it to your web server, but not as part of your web site since configuring the web.config will be a large manual effort.
If you are using a Web Application Project, then you could add the WCF Service directly to your existing project. However, I only recommend this approach if you are Silverlight applets within the web site that rely on the user's authenticated credentials.
WCF can be configured with a lot of bindings and it can be configured to return xml or json(.net 4.0). Try to create a wcf service configured to use basichttpbinding or wsHttpBinding and to format the response as json and use jquery to interact with the wcf service. This article might help you http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/Cross_Domain_Call.aspx
I've made a custom MembershipProvider which uses DependencyResolver from MVC3 to find it's dependencies. It works great for MVC apps, but not for the Web Site Adminstration Tool.
Is there some way that I can hook into the Web Site Adminstration Tool request handling to be able to configure a container before it handles the request?
Membership providers should be interoperable and therefore should work just by plugging into the config file of any provider based app.
Web Site Adminstration tool does exactly this, it runs in it's own web application completely decoupled from your MVC app, and just references your provider.
To make this work you need to ensure all dependencies required for the membership provider are packaged in one assembly and bootstrap your IoC container regardless of the environment it runs in. You can code this in such a way to share MVC initialisation, but not depend on it.
We have many custom built web applications (both external & internal) written in Classic ASP and ASP.NET 2.0 technologies. Internal users can upload files to these websites, which can then be viewed by External Users. In some cases, external users can upload documents as well.
Screenshot #1 gives a brief idea about the existing architecture.
Internal users upload documents to custom web applications. These documents are stored in a folder structure defined under the web application.
Meta data and user permissions like who can access the documents are stored in SQL Server database.
The same set of documents that are being uploaded to custom web applications also exist in SharePoint. However, the custom web applications are unaware of SharePoint. So, users have to download them from SharePoint and then Upload it to the custom web applications. We are currently using SharePoint 2010.
External users can also upload documents to the custom web applications. The meta data and user permissions of the document are saved into database based on the user who is uploading the document.
Screenshot #1:
Screenshot #2 shows the architecture that I am trying to achieve. I have done very little SharePoint development. Mostly, I have used the SharePoint web services to retrieve some list content but nothing more than that. Our future Custom Web Applications might be written using ASP.NET MVC. Please find the questions after the screenshot.
Screenshot #2:
Here are my questions:
I would like to have internal users continue to upload and maintain their documents in SharePoint. User security model is already defined in the SQL Server database. This security permissions should be available in the SharePoint document properties so users can choose who can view the document from the custom web applications. How can I achieve this? Should I have to copy the SQL Server user permissions info to SharePoint?
I believe that SharePoint Web Services or Business Connectivity Services (BCS) can help in retrieving the document and its related info from SharePoint. Which one of these would better suit this scenario?
Custom web app should display only the committed versions of the documents. If a user has checked out a document in SharePoint to make any changes, that checked out version of the document should not be visible to External users. Is that possible?
Has anyone tried this approach? Are there any pitfalls with this model? Are there any performance concerns with this design?
Will this design be of any hindrance if I rewrite our existing applications using ASP.NET MVC?
Is it possible to make use of SharePoint search feature within the custom web application (ASP.NET Web Forms / ASP.NET MVC)? In other words, can I send search criteria from custom web app and have SharePoint do the search and return the results back to custom web app?
I really appreciate your inputs.
Thanks in advance.
Question 1
Hard to say without having more details. So I'm going to assume that you currently use Active Directory for your authentication store. So this means that your SQL Server defines a list of roles and then has assigned memberships to these roles. I'm going to assume that your assigned membership is to AD users or groups. If this is true then I think your on the right path to push your permissions from SQL Server into SharePoint. SharePoint's API will accommodate what you need to do, however SharePoint has no built into mechanism for syncing your permission changes so that means you end up writing a whole lot of plumbing code. I would recommend that you research products that can handle the synchronization for you. Microsoft MIIS (I believe it is called Forefront Identity Management now) offer a set of architecture patterns that you should investigate.
Question 2
SharePoint Web Services or the SharePoint Client Access Services should work fine. I would highly recommend that use a proxy pattern to isolate your application from SharePoint calls (so you can isolate your application from SharePoint upgrades and potential content management server changes).
Question 3
Yes, that is possible. If you are using the publishing features of SharePoint Server (NOT SharePoint Foundation) you will have an easy way of identifying the current published version. Otherwise the service account you query with should be setup so it can only read published versions then SharePoint will automatically trim your query.
Question 4
I have not personally tried this design, but I really like the concept of creating a content management domain and then putting an abstract service layer on top of it. Will you have scale problems, depends on how you configure SharePoint and your applications. You can do it right or wrong. An depth answer between the two cannot be covered here. My one piece of advice is to make sure you plan for caching in your service interfaces (cache, cache, cache).
Question 5
Not if you implement it as a Service Layer. You would just use a repository pattern to call the service and return back entities for your model.
Question 6
Yes, Search is exposed via an API so it can be wrapped in a service layer too.
Good luck and feel free to contact me directly for more in depth discussion.
We have an ASP.NET MVC application that is not part of SharePoint. However, it'd be preferable to leverage SharePoint's security framework. For instance, when the user enters username/password in the non-SharePoint app, could it call a SharePoint webservice to authenticate the user? Or is there any other way to achieve this?
It all depends, if SharePoint uses AD then I see no added value in authenticating with SharePoint. If SharePoint uses forms-based authentication, I would create a custom web service running on the SharePoint server that allows you to authenticate users. That way if you ever need it again for another application you can use that webservice / wcf service.
To use the SharePoint Security framework you will have to run your application inside the context of the SharePoint. One quick solution to achieve this is to create a Virtual Directory under the SharePoint web application and place your code there and you will have the full sharepoint context.