Background:
I am working on a legacy ASP.NET 3.5 Web Forms applications. The application allows users to buy a subscription to a ‘white-label’ website which is generated for them and they can customize it further. It uses forms authentication.
A typical use-case is that the user creates an account on our system, purchases a website, and then proceeds to customize their website. The URL they will use to edit their purchased website is something like this: https://www.example.com/EditWebsite.aspx. There are many other pages also within our website editing toolbox with other URLs.
Problem:
My team has now been tasked with allowing people to use one account to access multiple website subscriptions. This means that one authenticated user could be trying to access one of many websites to edit if they use the URL mentioned above. Our system can be made aware of multiple subscriptionIds per User but the website editor web app only has support for one subscription.
To clarify with a simpler example: this would be like if Google all of a sudden allowed you to view two different inboxes with one GMail account. How would the system know which one you were trying to access if the URLs were the same for both?
We originally wanted to change the application to use URLs like: https://www.example.com/[subID]/EditWebsite.aspx which would give us all the information we need to send the user to the correct website. We looked into URL Routing to accomplish this but it seems that we would have to change all of the web app’s internal links to use the route config to generate the correct URLs. Maybe we have the wrong idea here but it seems like too much work for a legacy application.
Another potential solution we came up with was simply using our systems’ control panel web app (where they click links to edit any of their websites) to set a session cookie which our edit website web app can read to know which website to bring up. This has the disadvantage that the pages would not be bookmark-able and you could not look at multiple websites at once in different tabs of the same browser.
Question(s):
Is there any other options we have not investigated or thought of? Is there any other web sites which allow for this kind of behavior; how do they handle it? Is URL Routing the right way to do this and we just need to take the plunge?
Any input is appreciated!
The solution we ended up using was adding a URL parameter to the link which specifies which website you are trying to edit.
This parameter is included in the links to ‘Edit Website’ from the page which lists all of a user’s websites.
When present, this sets a session cookie for the user. If the request parameter is not present, the app looks for the cookie being set; this handles all the internal links within the application. if a cookie doesn’t exist and the request parameter was not set, we just pick the authenticated user’s first subscription from the list.
This isn’t perfect but it has worked without issue so far. The only consequence it has caused is that a user cannot edit multiple websites in the same browser session, e.g. using multiple tabs. This hasn’t resulted in any support issues yet though so it is pretty much a non-issue.