Using the ASP.NET membership provider database with your own database?

Question

We are developing an ASP.NET MVC Application that currently uses it's own database ApplicationData for the domain models and another one Membership for the user management / membership provider.

We do access restrictions using data-annotations in our controllers.

[Authorize(Roles = "administrators, managers")]

This worked great for simple use cases.

---

As we are scaling our application our customer wants to restrict specific users to access specific areas of our ApplicationData database.

Each of our products contains a foreign key referring to the region the product was assembled in.

A user story would be:

• Users in the role NewYorkManagers should only be able to edit / see products that are assembled in New York.

We created a placeholder table UserRightsRegions that contains the UserId and the RegionId.

How can I link both the ApplicationData and the Membership databases in order to work properly / having cross-database-key-references? (Is something like this even possible?)

All help is more than appreciated!

Answer 1

In my opinion, you should be able to integrate your database with the standard aspnet_db reliably, but I would advise against duplicating or replacing the aspnet_users table.

That is the focal point of all the providers that use the aspnet_db schema, including custom providers that may augment but do not implement custom replacement.

To maximize reuse of strong tested infrastructure code in the provider stack/API it is best to go with that flow.

You will want to be very attentive to any modified membership core functions and ensure that the way your new constraints behave in an expected fashion in each case.

The facet of the membership story that I have found needs the most attention is deleting a user, and a simple modification/addition to the delete user sproc can manage this capably.