We are building a site using asp.net mvc. We want to allow the user to easily register and create an account. There is though a very special piece of information, that will be registered in his profile, that we want to show to him *after registration is finished, and he is logging in for the first time.
The logic is whatever the URL that was hit, if the user is authenticated and does not have a valid profile, redirect him to the “Create Profile” page.
The whole ui will depend on those profile choices. What approach should we use within the MVC framework, to force this workflow on the visitor? The ideas I can come up with require tons of code duplication in controllers etc, so its clearly a bad idea.
We are using Membership for users, but profile is our own implementation (no profile provider) that will connect profile data to a userId.
I think the easiest way to do this is either create a custom AuthorizeAttribute, extending the existing one or create a separate FilterAttribute. Either one of these would get applied to all of your controllers and ensure that an authenticated user has a profile. In the case where no profile exists, the filter would redirect the user to the page where the profile is created. This would be done by setting the result property on the context to a RedirectResult to the profile creation action. Only if the profile exists and is complete would the filter allow the user to proceed to the desired action.
Alternatively, you could create a base controller that overrides OnActionExecuting and performs the same task. I prefer the attribute mechanism as it is more flexible, i.e., you could have some public actions that are available without the profile (including the profile setting action).