Question

I havent worked on ActiveDirectory Membership provider earlier, I have a doubt on creating an application using AD membership provider. If I need to foreign reference a user in a different table(lets say a custom role table ) then what primary identifier(Foreign key) should I use to identify the user in the the table which holds the relation of Role and the users.

Also , where is the additional information(other than AD details) about the user is stored like User Name, Department, Current project etc.

Is a snapshot of Active directory taken frequently and stored in a table in the database which is then used in sql joins?

Answer 1

The base membership provider (and derived providers such as the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider) uses UserName as a functional key (queries for members expect UserName as the key query parameter and return a single MembershipUser object). Those queries return MemberShipUser objects that have basic membership information—including roles, email, comments, etc. If you want to combine the ADMembership Provider with extra information, you’re best off using the UserName as the key to do so. Storing extra data is easier if you use a database because .UpdateUser only commits Email, Comment, and IsApproved properties.

And no, snapshots are not taken, though you can enable caching if you wish. The provider queries AD directly when it needs the information.