Question

MembershipProvider has methods

public abstract MembershipUser GetUser(
    Object providerUserKey,
    bool userIsOnline
)

to look up users by their unique identifier. This is useful if you want to have you own database and associate some objects of yours to certain memberships.

Can you do the same with RoleProvider ? There doesn’t seem to be any methods to map roles to their unique identifier or vice versa.

As a side note is it a good idea to just add your own tables to the asp.net sql database or is it better to have a separate database for your own objects and have foreign keys into the asp.net sql membership table.

Answer 1

There is no way within the API to return a role from an ID – you can get all roles via

Roles.GetAllRoles();

Or you can get all roles for a user by

Roles.GetRolesForUser(userName);

But not a single role.

I would guess the reason for this is that roles on there own are probably not that useful (at least as far as Microsoft are concerned).

Of course roles are just a table within the database so you can easily add this functionality yourself with some straight SQL – it will just take a little more work.

In terms of additional data – I normally create my own tables within the same database with foreign keys as you have suggested above. Although if you have not heard of Profile Provider (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/0580x1f5.aspx) you may want to look into that as well.