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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-25T11:12:31+00:00

For my first ASP.NET MVC 3 application, I’m using the aspnet_Users and aspnet_Roles tables

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For my first ASP.NET MVC 3 application, I’m using the aspnet_Users and aspnet_Roles tables to provide authentication for my users and for a few roles. That seems to work pretty well. Additionally, I want to make associations between the logged-in user and rows in various tables.

As a concrete example, I’ve got a Recipes table which has columns specific to recipes (name, dates, attributes) as well as a UserID column. That UserID column is currently a foreign key to a Users table in my IceCreamDB (NOT the aspnet_Users table in the aspnetdb) which contains various domain-specific information about users of the system. So, it’s easy enough to create a query that retrieves all of Matt’s recipes, by creating a user in my Users table named Matt who has some integer UserId and then use that UserId during Creates and Updates to the Recipes table. Great.

To tie the logged-in user “itsmatt” (from the aspnet_Users table) to my IceCreamDB’s Users table UserId for Matt, I have a Guid column in IceCreamDB Users table which is filled in with the aspnet_Users Id (its a Guid) for the login.

IceCreamDB’s Users table:

 UserId     1               // primary key used as FK for other tables 
 UserName   Matt
 Phone      555-1212
 Department Product Development
 Building   2-A
 Office     221
 UserGuid   7fc75a6c-7e32-43f3-be8c-be0122bf54cb // Guid from aspnetdb User table

And this works OK – as part of the user registration process, I create an aspnet_User, set up whatever roles (e.g., “Administrators”, “Owners”, “Production”) are appropriate, and then create a user entry in the IceCreamDB Users table, copying the Guid into the new row. This lets me log into the website and see my recipes or my orders.

But I feel I’ve home-brewed this solution and there’s likely a better, different approach to doing this. I’d like some guidance on this.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As far as I known, this is a quite common solution. The 2 other I’m aware of are using aspnet_Profile for simple settings, or editing the aspnet_Users table, which is not a good solution, because if you’d have more applications (aspnet_Applications) using the same aspnet_Users your end up having fields on that table which one application might use (not nullable) and the other doesn’t.

    In this tutorial they are basically doing the same thing.

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