suggestions for Membership in ASP.NET MVC application

Question

With this question I am mostly looking for answers from people that have implemented the out-of-the-box ASP.NET membership in their own database - I've set up the tables inside my database and as far as I can see they contain mostly what I need but not everything. I will have the notion of a Firm (Company) to which Users will belong so I will have to associate the aspnet_Users with my Firms table (each user will be a member of exactly one firm).

If possible, provide some guidelines how did you do it and what I might run into if I have to modify the table design at some point in the future. Preferably I will be using the default Membership provider.

I am having trouble to decide whether to go from scratch or use what ASP.NET already offers.

Answer 1

I would treat the ASP.NET membership as a separate service. Just use it as is and add any additional functionality on top of it.

In this case just create a table which links the users to the companies but don't alter the ASP.NET tables. If you have any additional information you need to store about users put this in another table which is associated with the ASP.NET membership users table.

Answer 2

I would suggest that you need to use a table-based Profile Provider implementation such as this one that Scott Guthrie blogged about. It is much better than the out-of-the-box profile provider as it allows you to define your own tables for profile information. In your case you would have a table that contains a Row per user and a FirmId and anything else you like such as nick name, social security number, whatever.

It works with the default Membership provider so you won't have to make any changes to it. There are two implementations in the example, a Stored Procedure based one and a Table based one. I prefer the second but they are both very easy to use.

The default profile provider proved a bit rubbish because it stored all of a user's information in a single field. The provider that I suggested solves this in a very efficient way.