PostAuthenticateRequest fires several times

Question

I have Forms authentication and I need a custom object to be stored in HttpContext.Current.User and in Thread.CurrentPrincipal.

To get this, I listen to PostAuthenticateRequest event, then read from the DB all the user data I need to be stored in HttpContext.Current.User and in Thread.CurrentPrincipal, then I instantiate custom IPrincipal and IIdentity objects and assign them to the above locations.

The problem is that for some reason PostAuthenticateRequest fires several times for a single request.. This causes unnecessary DB roundtrips that hurt performance..

How should I address this? (ASP.NET MVC 2)

Thanks.

Answer 1

Are you sure that it is running several times for a single request? Remember, every resource such as images and style sheets referenced on your page will trigger this event as they are treated as seperate requests. You are best advised to briefly cache the custom objects and check for their existence in the cache and only going to the DB if not there.

You will need to implement some locking on the cache as these requests typically happen very close together.

Answer 2

Just use the tag in your web.config to remove any authentication from your scripts, css and image directories. For example:

<system.web>
...
</system.web>

<location path="~/Scripts">
   <system.web>
      <authorization>
         <allow users="*"/>
      </authorization>
   </system.web>   
</location>