Something really confusing about how roles and membership tables establish a relationship

Question

Hello,

I know how to create users and assign them to roles etc, but when I tried to dig a bit deeper into how roles and membership tables are able to establish a relationship between each other, I got totally lost ( BTW – I do know how foreign/primary keys work ;) )

BTW - I've created tables in databases using aspnet_sqlreg wizard

Q1 - Both SqlRolesProvider and SqlMemebershipProvider have a property ApplicationName. I thought that in order for the two providers to be able to create association between their users and roles, they would both have to use same value for ApplicationName property. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

A) Anyways, I assume that SqlRolesProvider.ApplicationName property is only used to distinguish between table entries belonging to different role providers, but they don’t use that property in order to associate their roles only with membership providers with the same ApplicationName value?!

B) But wouldn’t it be most practical if roles providers could only be associated with membership providers with the same ApplicationName value ( thus where SqlRolesProvider.ApplicationName == SqlMemebershipProvider.ApplicationName )?!

Q2 - I was also curios whether roles and users could be associated if roles provider was connected to DB1, while membership provider was connected to DB2. Somehow I was still able to assign users to different roles, even though roles were defined in different database.

A) But why is that? Namely, if SqlRolesProvider.ApplicationName = “rolesP” ( ApplicationID=10 ) and SqlMembershipProvider.ApplicationName = “membership” ( ApplicationID=100 ), then in order for the table in DB1 to have relationship with table in DB2, the two would have to reference each other via ApplicationName entry ( actually via ApplicationID), which would act as foreign/primary key.

But the thing is, none of the foreign key fields in DB1’s tables holds a value equal to SqlMembershipProvider.ApplicationID = 100, which would suggests that there is no relationship established between tables in DB1 and DB2 ( I know that is not the case, since I’m able to assign users to roles ). So what am I missing?

thanx

EDIT:

Uh, don't know if anybody will still be reading this, but I did some more digging and got even more confused:

If both roles (with applicationName=R1 and applicationID=10)and membership provider(with applicationName=M1 and with ApplicationID=100) are in same DB, then creating a new user causes *aspnet_Users* table two create two entries for same user name– one with ApplicationID=10 and other with ApplicationID=100. As far as I know, when new user is created, only one field ( with ApplicationID=100 )should be added to aspnet_Users. Uh?!

Answer 1

I had a hard time following what you were saying...

Anyway... you seem to be looking at the database too much. Have you configured the web.config for your membership providers and were you able to query "Membership" using C# and NOT SQL queries?

Answer 2

Have you looked at the aspnet_UsersInRoles Table. This is the table that links the user to the role. The RoleProvider is designed to be separate from the MembershipProvider so that you can have them in separate DB's. Additionally it allows for you to set up roles for one application name and re-use those roles in two separate applications that each have a different application name for the membership provider. Don't get stuck in the mentality that you have to have the same application name for both providers or that your application name needs to match the running application. You don't need to have any name at all if you don't want to. I hope that this helps.