Question

Are there any pre-existing solutions out there which would extend the built in SQL Membership Provider & Sql Role Providers in .NET with the concept of Group Membership.

Right now the Roles relationship looks like

Users ====> UserRoles <=====Roles

I’d like to extend that to look like

Users ====> UserGroups <==== Groups ====> GroupRoles <==== Roles.

Let’s say you have an application with 30 or 40 distinct roles in it. Each time a new employee joins the company, you have to remember which set of roles that department normally gets & then make sure you tick those 8 checkboxes while setting up their website account.

If you had a group concept, you could set up a “Group” for each department as a logical grouping together of the roles that departments employees normally get. Then you could just add new Employee’s to a single group.

Are there any out of the box implementations for this available already which might save me writing my own ?

Answer 1

I assume your desired model is basically like mine here, isn’t it? My Role is just a User-Group wheras the authorization is controlled by AccessRule.

My approach has the advantage that you don’t need to implement a custom RoleProvider at all since it keeps it apparently untouched. ASP.NET does not need to know that i’ve enhanced it at the other end. I also have implemented a template-function that enables to create new Roles by using another role as template. This is the list of AccessRules of the other Role(or of your default-role). I don’t need to use IsInRole to check authorization. I’ve implemented my own hasAccess method that checks whether or not the user belongs to a role that has a given AccessRule(f.e. DeleteXY).