Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta application running on IIS. In my web.config I defined following section responsible for forms authentication:

<authentication mode="Forms">
    <forms 
        loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn" 
        name=".VNK" 
        protection="All" 
        timeout="43200" 
        cookieless="UseCookies" />
</authentication>

The defined login address is ~/Account/LogOn.

When I try to get the login url using:

FormsAuthentication.Initialize();
string loginUrl = FormsAuthentication.LoginUrl; 

I receive: /VNK/site/Account/Login

Why do I get a different address from the one defined in web.config?

UPDATE: The “/VNK/site/” prefix is not a problem here. The problem is that LoginUrl property of FormsAuthentication class does not reflect the value from web.config. It means that if I change the value of loginUrl attribute in web.config from “~/Account/LogOn” to e.g. “~/foobar”, FormsAuthentication.LoginUrl still has value of “/VNK/site/Account/Login”. Why ?

Answer 1

I think there is a bug in ASP.NET MVC 3 Beta. This problem does not appear in previous releases of ASP.NET MVC.

If anyone wants to replay this error, he should follow this:

1.Download the mvc framevork.

2.Create new ASP.NET MVC 3 Web Application

3.Applay Authorize attribute on About action in HomeController

[Authorize]
public ActionResult About()
{
   return View();
}  

4.Start application and invoke About action by clicking on About tab. You will get server error, because application is trying to redirect You to such URL:

http://localhost:%5Bport_num%5D/Account/Login?ReturnUrl=%2fHome%2fAbout

There is obviously no Login view. There is LogOn view. Url to LogOn action is defined in untouched web.config:

<authentication mode="Forms">
  <forms loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn" timeout="2880" />
</authentication>

But application does not reflect that. Have anyone any clue what’s going on ?

UPDATE:

I was right, there is a bug in MVC 3 Beta. From known issues:

“There’s a known issue that causes Forms Authentication to always redirect unauthenticated users to /Account/Login, ignoring the forms authentication setting used in Web.config. The workaround is to add the following app setting.”

<add key="autoFormsAuthentication" value="false" />

UPDATE 2:

Alexander Prokofyev noticed, that ASP.NET 3 RTM looks for another setting. So you need this line instead:

<add key="loginUrl" value="~/LogOn" />