Are there any advantages to create a custom Membership Provider

Question

I've been tasked with creating a ASP.net MVC web-based login system with registration, forgot password, and login but the existing system already has all the stored procedures to support this functionality and they don't fit well within the Membership interfaces.

Are there any advantages to implementing a custom membership provider? This answer makes reference to "integrations" but I am not sure what integrations it is referring to. Other than that, what is/are the benefit(s)?

I can see how a custom Role provider would benefit me, such as using Authorize attributes on my MVC actions. Can I create a custom role provider without creating/implementing a Membership provider?

Answer 1

If you have an option to use MVC 4, you can get your requirement fulfilled with SimpleMembershipProvider quite easily. It does provide simple to use interface for registering a new user, change/forgot password, and login. It also has its own RoleProvider that work well for most role management scenario.

To start with, its a good framework to use. The best part is, you can customize it whenever you want (this will happen most of the time when you load authentication and authorization mechanism to do more than what it should ideally be doing). As long as your MembershipProvider is derived from ExtendedMembershipProvider, it will work well with WebSecurity.

The benefit of implementing a custom provider is you get full control on the functionality provided by the provider API e.g. If you want to authenticate a user using custom algorithm then you can override ValidateUser method and add your custom implementation there.

About you last question, "can I create a custom role provider without creating/implementing a Membership provider?", I think it should be possible, have not tried personally though. You can try it referring to this link.

Hope this helps a bit.