Inject a MembershipProvider into ASP.NET MVC AccountController

Question

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 project templates include an AccountController class, which supports constructor injection:

public AccountController(IFormsAuthentication formsAuth, 
    IMembershipService service)
{
    FormsAuth = formsAuth ?? new FormsAuthenticationService();
    MembershipService = service ?? new AccountMembershipService();
}

An AccountMembershipService class is also included, and it too supports constructor injection:

public AccountMembershipService(MembershipProvider provider)
{
    _provider = provider ?? Membership.Provider;
}

I'm sure many of you have used these for unit testing, but my goal is to inject a SqlMembershipProvider using Windsor, and thus configure it at runtime using Windsor XML files rather than web.config. In other words, I want to use constructor injection for the AccountMembershipService class, and I want to continue using the built in ASP.NET 2.0 Membership system. I just want the configuration of the Membership system to go through Windsor IoC.

Is this possible without writing my own MembershipProvider, or does SqlMembershipProvider not play well with IoC?

From MSDN: "The SqlMembershipProvider constructor is called by ASP.NET to create an instance of the SqlMembershipProvider class as specified in the configuration for the application. This constructor is not intended to be used from your code."

I believe Phil asked a very similar question, here are the answers he received.

Thanks for your help.

---

UPDATE: Just to be clear, my reason for suppling the application's MembershipProvider via DI is to support multiple tenants. Each tenant has an isolated database with ASP membership tables. DI allows me to switch connection strings at runtime and thus keep the core application agnostic about which database is being used for each tenant. Windsor is controlling the DI and it "knows" which tenant makes the request via url:

var url = HttpContext.Current.Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_HOST"]

Mike Hadlow writes about this technique. I am just trying to integrate SqlMembershipProvider into his use of this IoC design.

Answer 1

Assuming you have your membership providers configured something like this:

<membership>
    <providers>
        <clear/>
        <add name="www.tenant1.com" 
         type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, ..." 
         .../>
        <add name="www.tenant2.com" 
         type="System.Web.Security.SqlMembershipProvider, ..." 
         .../>
    </providers>
</membership>

you can have Windsor select the appropriate provider like this:

var container = new WindsorContainer();
container.AddFacility<FactorySupportFacility>();
container.Register(Component.For<MembershipProvider>()
    .LifeStyle.Transient
    .UsingFactoryMethod(() => Membership.Providers[HttpContext.Current.Request.Url.Host]));
... (your controller registrations, etc)