Call custom MembershipProvider without casting Membership.Provider

Question

Is there a way to call the custom MembershipProvider I have implemented in code without having to cast the Membership class to my custom provider every time? For example, I setup my web.config like so:

<connectionStrings>
    <add name="TestDB"
         connectionString="conn_str_here"
         providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" />
</connectionStrings>

<membership defaultProvider="CustomSqlMembershipProvider">
    <providers>
    <clear/>
    <add name="CustomSqlMembershipProvider" type="Common.CustomSqlMembershipProvider" connectionStringName="TestDB"
         enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false"
         maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10"
         applicationName="/" />
    </providers>
</membership>

And my custom provider class:

namespace Common 
{
    public class CustomSqlMembershipProvider : SqlMembershipProvider
    {
        public void ChangeUsername()
        {
            // ...
        }
    }
}

Now to call my new custom function, is there some way to allow Membership.ChangeUsername() versus having to do this:

CustomSqlMembershipProvider customMembership = Membership.Provider as CustomSqlMembershipProvider;
customMembership.ChangeUsername();

Doing the cast everywhere you want to use it starts to get annoying after a while. Thanks in advance.

technophile technophile · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-29T21:02:55

You could add an extension method:

namespace System.Web.Membership
{
    public static class MembershipProviderExtensions
    {
        public static void ChangeUsername(this MembershipProvider provider, string oldUsername, string newUsername)
        {
            var customProvider = provider as CustomSqlMembershipProvider;
            if (customProvider == null) throw new Exception("Invalid provider type.");

            customProvider.ChangeUsername(oldUsername, newUsername);
        }
    }
}

Usage:

Membership.Provider.ChangeUsername("bob", "jane");

Call custom MembershipProvider without casting Membership.Provider

1 Answers