How to manage significant functionality differences between user types in ASP.NET MVC2

Question

I think I may have made a mess of my controllers. I have a fairly simple site that allows users of type "Staff" or "Client" to view Projects. Staff have access to all projects, can add and delete them, add and delete users, assign clients permission to projects, etc.

As it stands this means I have a UserController and ProjectController, littered with Authentication attributes (ie. so a Client can change his email but nothing else like permissions, and Clients can't add/remove/edit projects but can browse their contents).

And also, based on the user type/role, I switch out menu components. Should I be splitting up my controllers to have narrower focus, or is this a candidate for Areas? I "feel" like to much of my code is checking whether user X can do action Y based on both his role AND explicit per-project permissions.

PS. I rewrote the subject several times trying to make it shorter :\

Answer 1

Have you considerd splitting your controllers like so:

• ClientUserController

• ClientProjectController

• StaffUserController

• StaffProjectController

Splitting like this would allow you to easily have specialised controllers and views for each user type. Use a single Authentication attribute at the top of each "Staff" controller to secure access.

By setting up approriate routes, you could mainatin friendly URLs to each controler type: eg

• /User/Edit (Shows all User detail, but only allows edit of Email field)
• Staff/User/Edit (Allows edit of all User fields)