I am hoping to create some secure areas of my MVC application, I understand how users can register, login etc with the out of the box views controllers etc.
One thing that seems to be lost on me is a way to manage these users after they register. Some things I would like to be able to do:
Assign roles to users
C-R-U-D users
C-R-U-D roles
Is this all functionality I have to build myself or am I just missing something here? Everything I have found lends itself to writing code to do all these things, but it seems as though these are standard enough that they should exist.
it's very simple. if you take a look at your auto-generated DB for users, you will see that it already contains tables for roles etc. so everything was already prepared for generic use, you just need to define the basics and use it.
You can first try to play with it a bit by adding values manually to the DB tables, just to get the feel of how it works.
define a role
assign users with that role
now depending on your use, whether you'd like to allow\block access to action or entire controllers just set this for example above a action or class [Authorize(Roles = "Admin")].
in addition to (3) you can also make decisions in the server side (C# and cshtml) according to the user roles, by using:
var userManager = new UserManager(userStore);
if(userManager.IsInRole(user.Id, "Admin")){...}
read more in this link, it goes over the CRUD actions - define and use.
Related
Let's say that I have an MVC view that has one set of features available to non authorized users, and an extended set of features that is available to authorized users. Currently, I have implemented this by marking up my view with
#if(User.IsInRole(...)) {...}
in several places in the view file. This wasn't a big deal when it was just 2 or 3 things that authenticated users could do beyond the non-authenticated functionality, but now I have this all over the place in a "dashboard" type of page. It seems to be getting kind of messy.
Is there a cleaner or more elegant way to implement this? I am using viewmodels. I am wondering if I should use different viewmodels/views based on role, but then using different viewmodels seems like it might be more difficult to maintain. I am not sure what the best practice is for this, and I am open to ideas.
Edit
One example of what I am doing: I have several lists/tables that allows managers to edit the record, so the code adds an extra
<td>
for the manager-allowed actions. Another use case: when the manager is signed in, an employee name is now an actionlink instead of just text.
What you could try is encapsulating each portion of the view that will be interchanged based on roles into partial views. This has worked well for me in the past, and is much cleaner when trying to troubleshoot code as opposed to seeing a bunch of #if statements in a single view.
Hmmm. I have this idea. You need list of dashboards enumerations where you have a property like RolesAllowedToAccess (string[])
On the view you can foreach by dashboards enumerations where RolesAllowedToAccess contains current user role.
After you can render partials for each of dashboards. Make sence?
I have a question about how to design my controllers properly.
Project is fairly simple: blog, immage gallery with categories and images inside them, news secion.
However I don't know how to organize my controllers for this because I want to make somewhat admin panel where administrators can edit, add and modify these things. I've came up with 3 scenariosu so far...
Admin panel will have links to site/controller/edit, but layout for these action results will be different from standard one.
Admin controller will have all these actions like BlogAdd, BlogEdit so that url will be something like /site/admin/blogedit.
Create copies of Blog controller in admin folder so url will be like /site/admin/blog/edit - i sense problems with routing since 2 controllers with same name does not sound like a good idea, however I like ho URL looks in this situation.
What I'm trying to make is CMS somewhat similar to wordpress, where blog creation,editing and deletion is completely separated from default blog itself.
I suggest you stop thinking about URLs and Controllers being a 1->1 relationship. This will make things MUCH easier and less confusing. You can make the URLs work however you want with MVC's routing mechanism and there's no reason to restrict your controller design/organization because of the URLs you want, because you can always adapt the routing to with with the URLs you have in mind.
While building the website, just focus on the controllers (and the general interface) and ignore the URLs until you get to that point, and then when you come up with a good URL scheme go into the routing system and add the routes to connect to your existing controller actions as you want.
Once you code out your blogging engine you will have a much better idea of the user workflow and will probably find different ways to organize your URLs, and you can then reorganize your URLs without touching the controllers themselves.
As to your first requirement:
There are two ways to do this depending on your end goal. If your goal is to display the same core content, but have different user options available (different overall layout, additional buttons on the page, etc..) then the best idea is really to just pass in an IsAdministrator property in your view model, and make the slight changes to the page based on if that's true or false. The reason is because you still (most likely) want the core of the page to be the same, and this keeps you from duplicating code that is related to the core data (data that's being displayed for both admins and non-admins).
Edit: So in summary, organize your controllers based on what makes it easier to develop with, not based on how the user interacts with the system with. You can always change the latter, changing the former is harder and will make maintenance annoying.
You can create Areas in your MVC project and have your admin functionality in a controller in your admin area.
This will allow you to easily seperate your administration functionality from your general blog functionality.
That's how I'd do it.
Why don't you keep the routes the same and handle the different roles via security? For example:
/blog/name-of-topic/view to view a topic (all users)
/blog/name-of-topic/edit to edit a topic (only enabled for logged in users)
/blog/add to create new topics (only enabled for logged in users)
You can handle these actions in a single controller and decorate the actions that require logged users via the [Authorize] attribute. Same thing with the links on your views, you would enable the links to edit and add topics only to visible users.
You could still have a separate panel to allow admins to hit the aforementioned add/edit links .
I am a bit new to ASP.NET MVC and I have a bit of an ordeal. I am developing a website with several roles in it and of course the logic and gui that the user gets depends on the role (duh).
There are 10 separate roles in this application. They do share most of the same functionality but some screens will be different depending on which roles they are in.
Heres my question. All examples and tutorials I've read on the internet and the Apress book that I have been reading show an example how to implement roles with one role (Admin) in which the common way is to provide an Admin Controller (or even Admin area) for the authorized section of the site. However, what if there are 10 roles? Do I really need to code up 10 separate controllers?
Let me help the question by giving detail what is being developed. There will be a menu and the menu items will be filtered by role of what views(or pages) they can and cannot get.
The from what they select, it will provide them a restricted view(or authorized page) which from within will provide a plethora of functionality limited to just that role.
I know there are several different ways to do this, I just want to know what is the recommended or "clean" way.
Have any of you been in this situation and if so, how did you organize the logic for multiple roles? Separate all roles to separate controllers? Have few controllers but just apply authorize filtering on the action methods? Apply the role filtering within the views or partial views and leave the controllers alone?
Unfortunately there are little resources for how to implement several roles out there, I just want to know how to do it the "correct" way in terms of separating the logic.
I would put the pieces of functionality into partial views. Have one controller per piece of website and load partial views based on the role and what should be exposed.
I would only stray from that if you have an excessive amount of differences, like an administrator would possible have. Then I typically make an area to encapsulate that functionality.
Regardless of the controller separation I would definitely use partial views to minimize duplication of similar code. You will reap the benefits when you need to maintain that code.
Use Authorize on the action methods and apply the roles allowed for the operation.
Depending on what's appropriate for the scenario, build a list of available actions from the controller and send that to the view as part of the view model. In some cases its more appropriate to send a simpler view model that tells the view whether each operation is allowed i.e. CanDelete, CanEdit, CanViewDetailedInfo etc.
I'd start with that, and depending on the actual complexity re-factor to any combination of:
An ActionFilter that populates the available actions / instead of explicitly doing it in the controller
Use reflector to look for the list of roles applied in authorize / so you only specify roles once
Your own html helpers that take authorization into account. So when you declare an action link, its only output when the action is supported.
There are plenty of questions (and information) on setting up asp.net membership, role providers and the like. Whether or not you should use the built in platform provided by microsoft, or role extend the base classes and role your own.
I have decided to extend the default providers and implement my own membership and role providers. Now my question, is specifically around role authentication.
Traditionally, you would create roles maybe like 'Manager, Administrator, Employee, Super User' or whatever you have. But what would/should you do with respect to permissions which I consider to be a finer grain of control? Let me elaborate....
Within my asp.net mvc site I have different areas like administration, management, messaging, reporting etc. I would crate roles for each of these like 'Administrator', 'Manager', 'Reporter' etc. Without the appropriate role, you can't gain access to that area of the site. So I would lock down the entire controllers with this at the class level.
But now take one area as an example; messaging, and say I wanted to have finer grain permissions for CRUD; create a message, view/read messages, edit messages, delete messages etc.
Finally my question. How would it be best to implement this finer grain of control? One approach I see (not sure if it is a good one), is to just create asp.net membership roles for everything. So I might have....
Messenger (broad level role), CreateMessage, ReadMessage, EditMessage, DeleteMessage.
On one hand I would like some users to be able to read/view messages. But not necessarily create or delete them. Individual controller actions could have the specific roles applied.
Do you see any problems with this approach? Do you have a better idea?
Solution So Far
I have decided to create my own schema and implement custom membership and role providers. My schema includes;
User
UserProfile
Permission
PermissionAssignment
Role
RoleAssignment
Going to be away for the next day or two but will update with more information when I get a chance.
I think you should forget about roles on the authorization mechanism, ask for permissions instead (at the end a role is an agrupation of permissions), so if you look it that way, your Authorize Attribute should ask for an entity and action, not for a particular role. Something like:
[Authorize(Entities.Message, Actions.Create)]
public ActionResult CreateMessage()
[Authorize(Entities.Message, Actions.Edit)]
public ActionResult EditMessage()
[Authorize(Entities.Message, Actions.View)]
public ActionResult ViewMessage()
That way your roles do what they do best, abstract permissions collection instead of determining a inflexible way of access level.
EDIT: To handle specific rules like the one pointed by David Robbins, Manager A is not allowed to delete messages created by Manager B, assuming they both have the required permission to access this Controller Action, the Authorize is not responsible to check this type of rules, and even if you try to check that at Action Filter level it will be a pain, so what you can do is extend the Authorize validation to the ActionResult (injecting an action parameter holding the validation result), and let the ActionResult make the logic decision there with all the arguments in place.
This is a similar question, is not exactly the case pointed out here, but its a good starting point on extending the Authorize validation with Action Parameters.
With respect to your CRUD example, aren't you really talking about authorization, and would the authorization vary between the membership roles "Manager" and "Reporter"? I think you need to create a separate mechanism for those finer grained activities if the roles do not distinguish between a read and write authorization between messages.
If you were to create a role for each action - EditMessage, DeleteMessage - what will you do in the case when Manager A should NOT be able to delete messages for Manager B?
As well as adding [Authorize(Roles="Administrator")] etc above your controller. You can also put that attribute on the indiviual Actions too
I'm creating a new ASP.NET MVC application. So far I've used the Account controller for actions related to a user's account -- Login/Logout, Activation (like Register, but I use Register for other actions in the site so I've renamed it), Add/Update Contact information. Up to now, though, I've been concentrating on the administrative user views.
I'm at the point where I'm going to start creating the various views that non-administrative users will see. These are rather limited compared to the administrative interface. My inclination is to create a new set of views and associated controller in the User "family" instead of using the Account views/controller. Is this a good idea or should I stick with the Account controller? My feeling is that since this is for ordinary users it should be a separate controller since Account would apply to both ordinary and administrative users.
EDIT: After reading the first couple of responses, my refactored question is:
Do you consider the Account controller to be for administrative actions related to the user's account or for all actions on the user's account? Would you distinguish between membership/role related views/data and application related views/data to the extent of creating a new controller.
Related, but doesn't directly answer my question: ASP.NET MVC Account Controller usage guidelines?
I don't think there's a right or wrong answer here, so I'll give you my opinion.
Technically, either solution (extending the Account controller or creating a new controller) will work just fine.
So I think this is more a question of how the users perceive the functionality. I think it's a good idea to follow the convention that the URI dictates the controller (or vice versa, if you prefer).
If, for example, you'd like to have the "administrative" actions on a separate path, then that should be a separate controller. You might want to do this, for example, if you use an IIS module for authentication or if it makes your log analysis easier.
On the other hand, it might be the case that the users perceive account functions and administrative functions as part of the same family of actions, except that some users have additional features. If so, then that suggests that should be on the same path in the URI and, hence, part of the same controller.
Summing up, I think this is a question you should ask your user representative instead of folks on this site. :)
Update: Regarding your updated question, I would say that it is fairly natural to put an action for changing a user's password on the Account controller, and that action could be invoked by the user herself, not just an administrator. So I wouldn't presume that the Account controller is strictly for administrative tasks. On the other hand, your example of the fund-raising performance is well outside of the scope of membership-related things, so it is not clear that it belongs on Account, either. I'm still leaning towards, "ask your user representative."
In ASP.NET MVC you will usually create controls based on data types rather than access types. For example:
Instead of 2 /Controllers/UsersControl.cs and /Controllers/Admin/UsersControls.cs it is easier to use one common controller for both admins and regular users - /Controllers/UsersController.cs (by setting different [Authorize] attributes and views).
I would keep existing AccountController.cs for encapsulating account related functionality. And just add new UsersController.cs for the rest Users related functionality (which could have methods like OnlineUsers etc.)