Alternative approach to user management in asp.net web application

Question

Hi all.

I am using asp.net 2.0. I have been using asp.net membership provider for user management. But I think this would be more efficient if I could do this without using role and membership provider provided in asp.net. In fact I see bulky markups generated when I add login control, createuser control etc. in an asp.net web page.

By saying user management, I am referring to the overall login, user activity tracking, password reset/retrieval, role management in an asp.net web application. And I want to implement efficient way to accomplish this.

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Answer 1

What exactly bothers you? Server-side code, or the HTML which gets served to the client?

If former, then you can implement your own providers or just reinvent the whole system from scratch (which I do not recommend, but it might be worth it in some scenarios).

If latter, just write your own set of controls that use Membership API.

As far as "efficiency" is concerned, you're not clear in what "efficient" means to you.

Answer 2

Most (all?) of the membership controls support templates, which means you can customize the markup they generate to the client.

See this tutorial to get you started: A Crash Course on ASP.NET Control Development: Template Properties

As for the database hits, I don't think it's a huge problem, but if you're concerned I'd suggest load testing it to make sure. Also, if you set CacheRolesInCookie to true, you can eliminate some of those database calls.