asp.net membership and role provider

Question

I have not used ASP.NET Membership and Role Providers before but looking for a new project. Any guidance is appreciated.

Scenario: Pretty simple app. Need to develop an application in which there are customers and they have users. The application will be a document management system and documents uploaded by any of the users for a particular customer will be public to all users of that customer.

I looked at some samples of Membership system and I know that I can easily create a custom provider, but wanted to confirm its need.

Could I use ASP.NET Membership Provider and the Users table it creates to reference it from the Customers table I will have in my database? There will be a mapping table such as CustomerUserMapping so every user will have one or more customers they can be mapped to.

Also, there will be different types of roles for each user and I plan to use Role Provider for this.

Answer 1

If you can corralate the two. I personally have a similar situation where I upgraded an existing database with asp membership and put foreign keys across into my ow tables.

Answer 2

One problem you are likely to have is that the membership provider does not expose a user ID in any way. As far as the membership provider is concerned the username is the id. If you think about it it makes sense. Not all implementations have an ID. If you are planing on using non-username id in your relations you will need to keep in mind that your queries will start with the username as a base and not with the user id. Keep that in mind when you make your decision and architecture.