Question

I’m looking for a way to easily wrap security around a location, while at the same time using that to show/hide links on my menu.

I know how to block the location for unauthorized users, like:

<location path="AdminDirectory">
    <system.web>
        <authorization>
            <allow roles="SomeRole"/>
            <deny users="*"/>
        </authorization>
    </system.web>
</location>

And I can show/hide links with code, like:

myLink.Visible = User.IsInRole("SomeRole");

But what I’m looking for is a way to do this so that the “SomeRole” role name only has to be configured once. If I could read from the location element and test it in code, that would be ideal, but I’m not seeing a way to do that.

// Something like:
myLink.Visible = TestLocationAccess("AdminDirectory");

I can think of a really crappy way of doing this with a javascript/AJAX call to “test” the directory from the client and show/hide the link with javascript, but obviously that’s not ideal.

Thanks

Answer 1

You could use the CheckUrlAccessForPrincipal method:

myLink.Visible = UrlAuthorizationModule
    .CheckUrlAccessForPrincipal("~/AdminDirectory", User, "GET");

Since the method is static you obviously need to pass as second argument an instance of the current IPrincipal.