How to delete a SimpleMembership user?

Question

In my ASP.NET MVC app using Forms Authentication (via SimpleMembership), how do I delete a user/account?

The WebSecurity class doesn't expose DeleteUser. On a lark, I tried:

WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection(
  "MyDbConnection", "Users", "Id", "UserName", autoCreateTables: true);

new SimpleMembershipProvider().DeleteUser(userName, true);

but that complains that I haven't initialized the SimpleMembership provider. In any event, I would very much appreciate some sample code that shows how to delete a user. Thanks!

Bob

Answer 1

PussInBoots is absolutely correct, although this always throws a foreign key constraint violation for me if the deleted user has been added to any roles. I'm sure this was inferred by PussInBoots' "//TODO: Add delete logic here" comment, but I will typically clean up role memberships first like this:

[HttpPost]
public ActionResult Delete(string userName, FormCollection collection)
{
    try
    {
        // TODO: Add delete logic here
        if (Roles.GetRolesForUser(userName).Count() > 0)
        {
            Roles.RemoveUserFromRoles(userName, Roles.GetRolesForUser(userName));
        }
        ((SimpleMembershipProvider)Membership.Provider).DeleteAccount(userName); // deletes record from webpages_Membership table
        ((SimpleMembershipProvider)Membership.Provider).DeleteUser(userName, true); // deletes record from UserProfile table

        return RedirectToAction("Index");
    }
    catch
    {
        return View(userName);
    }
}

Answer 2

You probably need something like this:

    //
    // GET: /Members/Delete?userName=someuser

    public ActionResult Delete(string userName)
    {
        var user = context.UserProfiles.SingleOrDefault(u => u.UserName == userName);
        return View(user);
    }

    //
    // POST: /Members/Delete?userName=someuser

    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult Delete(string userName, FormCollection collection)
    {
        try
        {
            // TODO: Add delete logic here
            ((SimpleMembershipProvider)Membership.Provider).DeleteAccount(userName); // deletes record from webpages_Membership table
            ((SimpleMembershipProvider)Membership.Provider).DeleteUser(userName, true); // deletes record from UserProfile table

            return RedirectToAction("Index");
        }
        catch
        {
            return View(userName);
        }
    }

Answer 3

What happens if you just do Membership.DeleteUser(username,true). You might get a little prompt for adding a using directive on Membership. If you have it configured properly, you shouldn't need to be creating new SimpleMembershipProvider instance.

If you create it on the fly like that, you'll need to set connections on that object and configure it programmatically(it has no clue about the connection you created above). Usually people do that in web.config, but if you created the app using the forms authentication template, then you should have that taken care of automatically.

Your provider my have this bug for which is discussed and solved here: Membership.DeleteUser is not deleting all related rows of the user