How do I pass more than one value to a custom RoleProvider GetUserRoles method in my MVC app?

Question

I'd like to glue my custom permissioning system into a new ASP.NET MVC app. I've done a fair amount of work writing my own custom AuthorizeAttribute for the app. I've also written my own custom MembershipProvider and RoleProvider implementations. All of this works beautifully, up until I need to check the Roles my user is a part of. I did all this so I could simply do this on my controllers, and I used the default MVC template in VS2010 to retro fit my code as a prototype:

[CustomAuth(Roles='X')]
public ActionResult DoSomething()

My custom system is a bit whacky though. I don't call into a SQL db. It is a simple webservice that provides 3 methods: CheckPassword, GetPermissions, WebLogin. WebLogin simply wraps both CheckPassword and GetPermissions into one call. When using WebLogin from within ValidateUser didn't work I called TestPassword from within MembershipProvider.ValidateUser(userName,password) and when this call was successfull I would get back the UserID, else it would fail and I'd get back a NULL.

The problem is when I call into my implementation of RoleProvider. The abstract class defined GetRolesForUser with a single parameter of userName. My GetPermissions() method needs more than a single userName to work. It is defined like so:

GetPermissions(privateKey,userName)

Clearly, calling this from within the following RoleProvider method isn't going to work. I can't pass privateKey to the method that is supported out of the box.

public override string[] GetRolesForUser(string username)

Is it impossible to get my own custom method called from within my own custom RoleProvider?

Answer 1

You can cast the role provider as your custom type, which will give you access to your methods. Because your function is outside the interface though, this tightly couples your application to your role provider - which is probably fine for your purposes.

    RoleProvider rp = Roles.Provider;
    (rp as MyRoleProvider).GetPermissions(privateKey,userName);