Question

I have a fairly complex web app that was built (by a contractor) to use integrated authentication. As part of the authentication process, a GetNetworkID() function is used that looks like this:

private string GetNetworkID()
{
    return HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name.Split(new char[] { '\\' })[1];
}

When I run this on my development box, the HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name value is
myNetwork\\myUserID, so the above funciton returns my User ID, as intended, and the authenticaiton process works just fine.

But when I run this on my web server, I get an Index was outside the bounds of the array error thrown by the return statement in the GetNetworkID() function.

I’m a bit lost on how to troubleshoot this and how to figure out if it’s an IIS configuration issue (my web server is a Windows Server 2008 box running IIS 7), or something else.

If I hard-code my User ID as the return value for the GetNetworkID() function, it works on the web server, but I don’t have any great ideas about how to debug on the web server to determine what the HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name return value is that’s causing the array index error.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

IIS runs as the IIS Service Account, so Current.User.Identity is likely going to be the name of the IIS Account.

For completeness sake, you should check for ‘\’ either with a Find() or by calling split, and checking the length of the resultant array. If the length is 1, that means the id isn’t in the form of domain\username.

In general, if you want to debug, you can write any value to the HTTP Response stream like so:

Response.Write(HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name)

Another method is to setup an ASP page variable, and set the page variable to the value you’d like to inspect. You can display the variable value either through ASP code, or through Javascript.