Question

I am working on creating a custom membership class for my asp.net project. In the MembershipProvider class, function for user validation is defined as follows.

public abstract bool ValidateUser(string username, string password);

The problem is validation can be failed for several reason, so I want to provide more detailed description as to why login failed (e.g., user is lockedout etc) but that cannnot be done via a bool return type. I certainly can create one of my method for validation as follows

public RichStatusDetailsEnum ValidateUser(string username, string password);

Problem with above is that I will not be able to call this method in a generic way (just by Membership.ValidateUser). Rather I will have to instantiate object of my custom membership provider etc etc. Does anyone else has encountered same issue and if there are any better ways of handling this type of situation?

Answer 1

Description

One way to get this done is

• Store the reason, why the validation failed, in the HttpContext.Current.Items Collection
• If ValidateUser failed, get the data and do something (like add an error to ModelState.AddModelError("Property","Message");

Sample

public override bool ValidateUser(string username, string password)
{
    // your custom logic goes here
    HttpContext.Current.Items["ValidateUserResult"] = ValidateUserFailed.UserNameWasWrong;
    return false;
}

public enum ValidateUserFailed
{
    UserNameWasWrong, PasswordWasWrong, BecauseIDontLikeYou
}

your other class

More Information

• MSDN – HttpContext.Items Property
• MSDN – ViewDataDictionary.ModelState Property