Question

I just started an MVC 3 project using Forms Authentication. I have a web project (mvc project), and a data project. The data project handles all database interactions.

I need to store the current user id in my database on every insert and update.

Here’s what I am doing right now. I feel like this has to be a common scenario. Can anyone shed some light on a better way to do this?

1. On LogIn or Register, I grab my current user record (by username) from the database and store the user id in session.
2. When saving a record within my data project, I refer to the httpcontext (if it exists) and use the user id that is stored in session.

This works for all but one scenario. It fails when a user has a valid cookie saved, and so they are allowed to bypass the login/register action. When this happens, obviuosly, my session variable for userId is null. My next step would be to create a base controller and imlement OnAuthorizeStarting to check if my Session variable is null or not. This feels kludgy, and I’m hoping there is a better way.

I do not want to have to pass the user Id to the data project as a parameter on every Save call.

Anyone have some brilliance? thanks.

Answer 1

The UserID is available via membership. So, something like this:

Membership.GetUser(HttpContext.User.Current.UserName).ProviderUserKey

The IPrincipal (HttpContext.user.Current) is created when the user is authenticated against the forms authentication cookie. You just pull up the user id from the Membership whenever you need it.

If you don’t like accessing Membership every time then you can always create a static helper class that wraps your UserID session call. If it’s null, it goes out to the membership provider, gets it, then stores it in the session.. on later accesses it just retrieves the session variable.