Question

Basically I keep getting thrown out from my asp.net mvc application because the User.Identity.IsAuthenticated is false, this only happens because of the code below related to task comments (marked ** below) – I cannot figure out why it is happening, any help is appreciated.

Code below inside a custom attribute on my base controller that authenticates users, if not authenticated I throw an exception like so:

if (!httpContext.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
   throw new NoAccessException("unauthorized user"); // invalid users are thrown out...

Code that is causing the User.Identity.IsAuthenticated + User.Identity.Name to become null is:

[HttpGet]
    public ActionResult TaskDetail(int houseid, int taskid)
    {

        //NOTE: _repo is a simple ISession over Linq to Sql
        //GetCurrentUser() is a extention method which gets the current logged on user
        //i.e. User.Identity.Name so I can get the users credentials

        var loggedonuser = _repo.GetCurrentUser();

        var _house= _repo.Single<House>(x => x.HouseID== houseid&& x.ClientID== loggedonuser.CompanyID);

        if (_house== null)
            throw new NoAccessException();

        var summary = _instruction.ToSummaryDTO();

        var companies = _repo.All<Company>();
        //var users = _repo.All<User>();

        var task = _repo.Single<Task>
            (x => x.HouseID== _house.HouseID && x.CompanyID == loggedonuser.CompanyID);

        var dto = new TaskDTO
        {
            TaskID = task.TaskID,
            Title = task.Title,
            Description = task.Description,
            DateCreated = task.DateCreated,
            IsClosed = task.IsClosed,
            CompanyID = companies.Where(y => task.CompanyID == y.CompanyID).SingleOrDefault().Identifier
        };

        **dto.AllComments** = _repo.All<TaskComment>()
            .Where(x => x.TaskID == task.TaskID)
            .OrderByDescending(x => x.Timestamp)
            .Select(x => new TaskCommentDTO
            {
                Comment = x.Comment,
                Timestamp = x.Timestamp,
                CompanyID = companies.Where(y => x.CompanyID == y.CompanyID).SingleOrDefault().Identifier
            });


        return View(new TaskViewModel
        {
            Summary = summary,
            TaskDetail = dto,
        });
    }

NOTE: If I omit the dto.AllComments (IQueryable) then everything works fine, I never get thrown out my system or more importantly User.Identitiy remains correct…. I have tried to convert to list – which is what I ideally want however that does not work either, maybe there is something wrong with my linq method…

My DTO:

public class TaskDTO
{
    public int TaskID { get; set; }
    public bool IsClosed { get; set; }
    public string CompanyID { get; set; }
    public string AssignedTo { get; set; }
    public DateTime DateCreated { get; set; }
    public string Title { get; set; }
    public string Description { get; set; }
    public IQueryable<TaskCommentDTO> AllComments { get; set; }
}


public class TaskCommentDTO
{
    public string CompanyID { get; set; }
    public string UserID { get; set; }
    public DateTime Timestamp { get; set; }
    public string Comment { get; set; }
}

EDIT: where exception is being thrown

I have traced the exception now, I overrided the code below in my base controller which helped me discover the bug:

    protected override void Execute(System.Web.Routing.RequestContext requestContext)
    {
        base.Execute(requestContext);
    }

After the page finished loading, this code was ran once again, when I checked out the request context In the Values for RouteData I found “Error” and “FileNotFound”, at this point the user gets nulled out too, now I need to find out which file is not found… 🙁

Answer 1

From your code:

var task = _repo.Single<Task>
            (x => x.HouseID == _house.HouseID && x.CompanyID == loggedonuser.CompanyID);

    var dto = new TaskDTO
    {
        TaskID = task.TaskID,
        Title = task.Title,
        Description = task.Description,
        DateCreated = task.DateCreated,
        IsClosed = task.IsClosed,
        CompanyID = companies.Where(y => task.CompanyID == y.CompanyID).SingleOrDefault().Identifier
    };

This line:

CompanyID = companies.Where(y => task.CompanyID == y.CompanyID).SingleOrDefault().Identifier

calls the property Identifier on a SingleOrDefault() result which could be null. Have you checked that this is ok. Is it on this line that the exception is thrown?

Note you can use IEnumerable instead of IQueryable; probably won’t make any difference but if that’s the crashing part you can try it for nothing.