Question

I have an application that needs to hit the ActiveDirectory to get user permission/roles on startup of the app, and persist throughout.

I don’t want to hit AD on every form to recheck the user’s permissions, so I’d like the user’s role and possibly other data on the logged-in user to be globally available on any form within the application, so I can properly hide functionality, buttons, etc. where necessary.

Something like:

if (UserProperties.Role == Roles.Admin) {     btnDelete.Visible = false; } 

What are the best practices for storing static user data in a windows app? Solutions such as a Singleton, or global variables may work, but I was trying to avoid these.

Is a User object that gets passed around to each form’s contructor just as bad?

Answer 1

Set Thread.CurrentPrincipal with either the WindowsPrincipal, a GenericPrincipal or your custom principal. Then, you can just call IsInRole:

if (Thread.CurrentPrincipal.IsInRole(Roles.Admin)) {    btnDelete.Visible = false; }