I am developing an Intranet application and have successfully integrated with Active Directory.
When we add a new customer I would like to assign a Customer Advisor from a dropdown list.
I am able to populate the dropdown list using the following
PrincipalContext pc = new PrincipalContext(ContextType.Domain, "DOMAIN", "dc=domain,dc=org");
GroupPrincipal group = GroupPrincipal.FindByIdentity(pc, "customerAdvisors");
ViewBag.Guid = new SelectList(group.Members, "Guid", "DisplayName");
I would like to then store the Guid of the selected user along with the Customer data in the database.
However, I am unsure of how to setup foreign key constraints in my Model as the table I am joining to is within Active Directory.
Do I need to create a separate Employee table within my DB and sync the required fields or is there a simplified way of doing this?
I've never done this but some quick research makes it look possible.
You could just save the Guid for your adviser on your Customer. The AD Guid can go into the Guid data type. You should be able to query individual users by using this method:
UserPrincipal user =
UserPrincipal.FindByIdentity(pc, yourUsersGuidAsAString);
The down side is that every time you want your customer adviser's info (like their name or email address) you will have to do a separate query to AD. Harder to use ORM.
In my application I have a different use case, but I have also integrated my application with AD. The route that I took was to save this information in my own DB instead of hitting AD every time. In large part because my architecture makes it hard to get to AD in the same way you can. Also it's easier to use ORM (like entity framework in my case) to pull in the information that I want. The downside to this is then you need to ensure that the information you have in your database is reasonably up to date with what's in AD.
You will have to make the judgement on which approach makes the most sense for your architecture/use case.
Hope that helps.
Related
I'm creating a jhipster application and I want to let my user access only to the entities that he created, for example in my case I just want to have for each user a special view of the entities product that he created and not for all the products created by other user.
Thank you in advance,
Waiting for your help ...
JHipster does not provide that type of filtering, you'd have to implement it yourself. Out of the box, the only thing you can do is play with the security roles, both in the front-end and the back-end (as pointed out by #gaël-marziou).
In the front, using authorities in the state declaration (entity.js file). In the back, using #Secured in the controllers (EntityResource.java).
In order to the type of filtering you need, you have to create new attributes in your entities to store the user that he/she created, and then create new methods in your repository to do proper queries.
I have two type of models in the application I'm working on: User and Account.
Every account has many users. Every user has one account.
When I download the user object from an API, I get the account_id, but not the actual account object. The account object will be downloaded after the user object.
What is the best practice for establishing the relationship between the user and his account in this situation?
Should I insert an empty row into the Accounts table with just its account_id field filled in? And then later, when I download the account, update that row?
First, Core Data centric definitions, you have 2 entities (User and Account) and no tables (because this is an object store, not a SQLite database).
So, you wouldn't have empty rows, you would have stub objects (partially complete objects that will be filled in later).
There is no best practice when it comes to stub objects. Whether you should create them is entirely dependent upon your use case. In some cases it helps to have the basic information about an item so that you have something to show the user while you go and get the details. In your case, you only have an identity so the benefit of stub objects seems very low.
I have been learning how to use ASP.NET MVC4 and have been getting my head around authenticating users and user roles and posting data using the entity framework to SQL.
However I have not been able to find any guides/resources (maybe I don't know the correct term) for posting and retrieving data that is unique to an specific user. For example how would a user only see the entries that they created if it was a site that stored data that is personal to each user.
What patterns/designs does one use when trying to do this?
Creating a sandbox of data for a specific is usually tied to authentication. You can access this many ways through ASP.Net.
First of all, every user gets identified even if they never log in. They get a session identifier. It essentially creates a small place in memory for this user where you can store any user related information. Think of Sessions as walled gardens for each user.
Session["UserFullname"]
This works, but realize Session is limited by time, so it is very volatile. Utilize it, but don't depend on it.
The next method is to authenticate a User. This is done using Cookies, but usually handled transparently for you by ASP.Net Membership or other authentication providers. To access the authenticated User you just need to use a simple line in your Controller actions.
// User is the property
User.Identity.Name
Both these methods can store information about your user that you would use to query data specific to them.
Select * From Orders Where UserId = *User.Identity.Name*
Note that both Session and User are accessible through HttpContext.Current as well, as long as you are in a web environment.
HttpContext.Current.User
HttpContext.Current.Session
You won't need to access them this way unless you are not inside your Controller, or inside of another class that doesn't already give you access to the HttpContext. I don't recommend this way either, since your code could be used outside of a web application where HttpContext is not available.
I hope that makes sense, and please feel free to ask me questions.
This is not so much about mvc, but more about the problem of relating data to a specific user. You have to ask yourself, how would you identify a piece of data to a user.
The way you would do this is to tie the data to the user in the data store somehow.
In a relational database you would do this by having a User table and using the unique key on that table to insert data into another table such as Order. Order would then have a User Id.
When a user logs in, you could store that ID in session and use that to filter out orders based on the id.
I am building an MVC4 application and need to use external authentication (Facebook, etc). I have that working fine. I see the SimpleMembershipProvider creates 2 separate tables to handle this: "webpages_Membership" and "webpages_OAuthMembership". I need to map other tables (foreign keys) to User ID. The problem is both tables have a user ID which are unrelated to each other.. I could ignore the foreign keys in the database if necessary (don't like that though), but the bigger question is this: in code, how would I determine whether a user is authorized externally or locally so that I know where to get his other info from? Specifically, I have a user profile table where I will map other attributes to.. having 2 different types of user, how does one go about this?
Right, I have learned more about MVC4 and SimpleMembershipProvider and I see now that the User ID on both tables is actually a foreign key to a parent table called UserProfile. So, User IDs will still be unique.. it's just the mappings are a little different to what I was accustomed to with the standard ASP.NET membership provider. Email address and whatever other properties are required can be easily applied to the UserProfile table.
In creating a new ASP.NET MVC application, I have an issue with the approach I'm using to store user-created data for temporary users who have yet to create an account which I then try to convert to a real user. That probably doesn't make much sense, so let me explain:
A visitor to the site can enter profile settings before being made to register with a username, password, etc.
I'm creating database entries via LINQ to SQL for a new user in this case, using the Request.AnonymousID value as a temporary username.
When the user chooses to register, I need to 'switch over' the relevant database records to use the newly entered username instead of the temporary one.
The problem is that when I try to update the record I can't because the username is the primary key, so I'm forced to delete the record and add a new one...
I can probably persevere with this, but I think I might just be going about this in completely the wrong way and wondered if anyone could suggest a better way to allow visitors to store information before they've registered and have that carry over when they do.
I know about profiles but want the profile information to be available to other visitors. I also know that I can create an anonymous profile but it seems like I should be able to keep the data model out of the web.config file.
I would suggest having an independent primary key for the table with your custom user data.
And then have fields like RefAnonymousId and RefUserId to relate that user data to the anonymous user and the registered user, respectively.
For example:
TABLE UserData
(
UserDataID int IDENTITY(1,1) PRIMARY KEY,
RefAnonymousId uniqueidentifier,
RefUserId uniqueidentifier,
... (data fields),
(maybe also unique keys on RefUserId and RefAnonymousId)
)
That way you will also be able to identify the user when the user is logged out and maybe automatically log the user in...