Dependency Injection with Custom Membership Provider

Question

I have an ASP.NET MVC web application that implements a custom membership provider. The custom membership provider takes a UserRepository to its constructor that provides an interface between the membership provider and NHibernate. The UserRepository is provided by the Ninject IoC container.

Obviously, however, this doesn't work when the provider is instantiated by .NET: the parameterless constructor does not have a UserRepository and cannot create one (the UserRepository requires an NHibernate session be passed to its constructor), which then means that the provider cannot access its data store. How can I resolve my object dependency?

It's probably worth noting that this is an existing application that has been retrofitted with Ninject. Previously I used parameterless constructors that were able to create their required dependencies in conjunction with the parametered constructors to assist unit testing.

Any thoughts, or have I built myself into a corner here?

Answer 1

Hi,

I had same problem, I solved it by passing required data using authentication ticket to identity object.

Then no objects need to be injected into membership providers.

In my authentication code I have

    [NonAction]
    private void SetAuthTicket(Member member, bool isPersistent)
    {
        HttpCookie cookie = Request.Cookies.Get(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName);

        FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(member.Email, isPersistent);

        string userData = "|" + member.ID + "|" + member.Firstname + "|" + member.Lastname + member.Culture;

        FormsAuthenticationTicket ticket = new FormsAuthenticationTicket(1, member.Email, DateTime.UtcNow, DateTime.UtcNow.AddDays(7), isPersistent, userData);

        string encryptedTicket = FormsAuthentication.Encrypt(ticket);
        cookie = new HttpCookie(FormsAuthentication.FormsCookieName, encryptedTicket);
        Response.Cookies.Add(cookie);
    }

And in Global.asax

    void Application_OnPostAuthenticateRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        IPrincipal user = HttpContext.Current.User;
        if (user.Identity.IsAuthenticated && user.Identity.AuthenticationType == "Forms")
        {
            FormsIdentity identity = user.Identity as FormsIdentity;

            MyIdentity ai = new MyIdentity(identity.Ticket);            
            MyPrincipal p = new MyPrincipal(ai);

            HttpContext.Current.User = p;
            System.Threading.Thread.CurrentPrincipal = p;

            if (!String.IsNullOrEmpty(ai.Culture))
            {
                CultureInfo ci = new CultureInfo(ai.Culture);
                System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = ci;
                System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = CultureInfo.CreateSpecificCulture(ci.Name);
            }
        }
    }

And in Identity class I have MemberName, Firstname and Lastname properties that return parts of ticket string.

Answer 2

You might want to keep the parameterless constructor, that initializes the needed repositories using Ninject. You might want to use the Common Service Locator, so you won't need to have neither a reference to Ninject nor it's container inside your custom provider. It seems Ninject doesn't have an official an adapter implementation for CSL, but writing one shouldn't be to hard (check the other implementations, like Windsor's), and I'm sure there's an unofficial implementation somewhere.