Sharepoint Forms authentication

Question

Hi,

I have created an authetication provider and went to central administration >> Authentication Providers and changed the authentication settings to Forms and filled in Membership provider and Role manager details.

Now, when i go to create a site collection under the above mentioned web application, the people picker in the create site collection page still refers to the active directory(central admin has windows authentication). Can any one explain this behaviour?

I actually expected the People picker in the Create site collection page to refer to the Forms database rather than active directory.

Thanks

Answer 1

In the web.config for your web app, you need to change the value in the <PeoplePickerWildcards> node. Change the key to your membership provider.

Answer 2

Hi,

Thanks for the reply. But what i need to do is when i create a site collection under the web application with forms authentication, i need to give forms users as site collection administrators in the create site collection page. as of now, it only seems to take users from the central administration site's authentication provider.

Answer 3

You need to add your the configuration information for the membership provider to the web.config file for Central Administration. This will allow Central Admin to find from both AD and your own membership. There are examples on Technet for a SQL Server and an LDAP membership provider. Note how it mentions that the membership provider info needs to be added to both the web app's web.config and to Central Admin's. If you're using a Role Manager though, don't put that info in the Central Admin web.config, or at least not unless you really know what you're doing and why. :)

Once you do this the people picker should be able to find people from your FBA solution's membership provider. One little caveat if you happen to be using the same AD store (or some kind of replica) for both Windows auth and LDAP auth. You'll need to use the "prefix" of your membership provider name when specifying the user, otherwise the people picker will always lookup the native AD version of that user. For example, looking up "jdoe" will always find "domain\jdoe" first. If you want jdoe from an LDAP provider pointing at that AD, you'll have to explicitly put in "ldap:jdoe" (substituting whatever you called your membership provider in the web.config for "ldap"