Basic Authentication WCF service installed in SP2010 with claims authentication

Question

This configuration works with SP2010 in classic mode or SP2007.

We have a WCF service that is installed as an Application under the Sharepoint web site. This application uses Basic authentication.

I'm getting an UnauthorizedAccessException. The exception message is

Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)).

In the debugger, I notice that on the SPWeb object, the CurrentUser property is null.

What do I need to do to allow this user through basic authentication to be able to read the sharepoint lists?

 using (SPSite siteCollection = new SPSite(url))

        {
            using (SPWeb rootWeb = siteCollection.OpenWeb())
            {
                DataTable news = ReadNews(rootWeb, (uint)sizeNumber);

/// continues...

Frog Pr1nce Frog Pr1nce · Accepted Answer · 2014-12-11T19:25:50

Well... better late than never. I ran into this same problem today. The problems comes when you publish .ASPX pages in the _Layouts folder, and then, when using Forms or Claims auth, make that custom page your first hit in a session (with no previously remembered login). SharePoint authentication isn't fired by default (even if you inherit from the LayoutsPageBase class). If you navigate to some other SharePoint page (such as _Layouts/15/Settings.aspx) and then come back, then the CurrentUser is filled in. I had to use Reflector to get a better clue of what was going on, and how to fix it. The short answer is, once you realize that the CurrentUser == null, you need to add this line of code:

Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.HandleAccessDenied(new UnauthorizedAccessException());

In my case, this code generates a challenge/response to the browser, which I used to log in, and immediately following this line of code, the CurrentUser object is filled in correctly. Here is what my entire function ended up looking like:

public static bool isAdminAuthorized()
{
    Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContext oContext ;
    Microsoft.SharePoint.SPWeb oWeb ;
    Microsoft.SharePoint.SPUser oUser ;
    try
    {
        oContext = Microsoft.SharePoint.SPContext.Current;
    }
    catch { throw new Exception("Can't obtain Sharepoint Context!"); }
    try
    {
        oWeb = oContext.Web;
    }
    catch { throw new Exception("Can't obtain Sharepoint web!"); }
    try
    {
        oUser = oWeb.CurrentUser;
    }
    catch { throw new Exception("Can't obtain Sharepoint current user!"); }
    if (oUser == null)
    {
        Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPUtility.HandleAccessDenied(new UnauthorizedAccessException());
        oUser = oWeb.CurrentUser;
    }
    foreach (Microsoft.SharePoint.SPGroup oGroup in oUser.Groups)
    {
        if (oGroup.Name.ToUpper().Contains("OWNER"))
        {
            return true;
        }
    }
    return false;
}

Basic Authentication WCF service installed in SP2010 with claims authentication

1 Answers