How to perform an automatic login after confirming the account with ASP.NET Identity

Question

I'm currently developing an MVC5 web app, using ASP.NET Identity 2 for account control, the specific problem I'm having concerns automatically logging in the user after e-mail confirmation.

So the flow is as follows:

1. User clicks on the Register link
2. Enters email (username) / password, hits Register
3. An email is sent to the given address with a "please confirmaccount" URL
4. User clicks the link, confirming email address and is automatically logged in

The confirm email action on the controllers looks like this:

[AllowAnonymous]
public async Task<ActionResult> ConfirmEmail(string userId, string code)
{
   // If userId or code is empty, show an error or redirect
   if (userId == null || code == null)
   {
     return View("Error");
   }

   // Attempt to confirm the email address
   var confirmEmailResult = await UserManager.ConfirmEmailAsync(userId, code);

   // Retrieve the user (ApplicationUser)
   var user = await UserManager.Users.FirstOrDefaultAsync(u => u.Id == userId);
   if (user == null)
   {
     // If the user doesn't exist, redirect home
     return RedirectToAction("Index", "Home");
   }

   // If the confirmation succeeded, sign in the user and redirect to this profile page
   if (confirmEmailResult.Succeeded)
   {
     await SignInManager.SignInAsync(user, false, false);

     var url = Url.Action("Profile", "User");
     return RedirectToLocal(url);
   }

   // In all other cases, redirect to an error page
   return View("Error");
}

The weird thing is, I can either confirm the e-mail or sign in the user, for some reason if I do both... it doesn't work. Specifically, I get a TimeOutException on this line:

await SignInManager.SignInAsync(user, false, false);

which is very mind-boggling since I know the db and the app server are not the problem.

Am I going about this the wrong way...?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Ok, the answer has been found, problem was the following, for each request a transaction with level Read Commited was being setup. This caused the second change (create) to be blocked by the first (email confirm), causing the timeout...

async Task IRunBeforeEachRequest.Execute()
{
  _HttpContext.Items[IdentityContextTransactionKey] = _IdentityContext.Database.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted);
  _HttpContext.Items[TravellersContextTransactionKey] = _TravellersContext.Database.BeginTransaction(IsolationLevel.ReadCommitted);
}

Thanks again for the help!