Question

I’m using ASP.NET MVC 3 with Entity Framework 4. When a user logs in, i would like to store some informations from the database like ID, Name etc. So i created my own CustomIdentity/CustomPrincipial but i dont want to cast every time, so i create a BaseController who cast the Identity:

public class BaseController : Controller
{
    public CustomIdentity CustomIdentity { get { return (CustomIdentity)User.Identity; } }
}

and all my other Controllers interhit from the BaseController. But i dont think this is a good practise. Is there a better way?

Answer 1

I would use an extension method to avoid additional inheritance

public static CustomerIdentity Customizes(this IIdentity identity)
{
    return (CustomIdentity) identity;
}

this is a little more discoverable and there isn’t confusion about whether User.Identity or CustomerIdentity should be used. when you need the identity

var identity = User.Identity;

and when you need the additional property

var identity = User.Identity.Custmoized();