How to break an ASP.NET website down into modules that can be enabled/disabled?

Question

I have an ASP.NET website with some independent sections. I need a way to turn on/off the different sections (each section is in it's own directory) based on the user selection. How can I prevent the users from accessing sections that are turned off?

Answer 1

you can require a log-in for those pages. I'm not sure if that's what you want.

Answer 2

You could look for a specific web.config app setting for each section. Each section would need a web.config setting with a sectionID app setting element.

If your using master pages, just do a check in the master's on PageLoad and check to see if the user has access to the sectionID store in the config setting. Store the section IDs that the current user has access to in the session or a cookie or something (not sure what type of security your looking for). Have one global function to lookup the app setting from the web.config. Depending on which page is calling it (from which directory) you will get the specific section's ID.

If the user does not have access redirect or show a message or something.

Answer 3

The solution I ended up using was to make a new class ModulePage that inherited Page. In the OnInit it would check an Abstract property I added IxModule to see if that that module was turned on or off, if it was on the page will display and if it is not the user is redirected to another page. Each page in each module has to be change to inherit ModulePage and then just specify the IxModule value. It is working very well.