How to implement roles in ASP.NET using existing AD groups

Question

I'm trying to implement some role-based functionality in my web application (.NET 4.0.3) so that I can control what menu items users can see based on their roles, either Administrator or User.

I'm simply using existing AD groups to administer the roles. Let's say there is a team in my organisation that is represented by an AD group called IT-Managers, and there is another team with AD group IT-Support. I simply want to map IT-Managers as Administrator and IT-Support as User.

I can easily use WindowsPrincipal.IsInRole() to check whether the currently logged-in user belongs to either group, but how do I tell the application that the logged-in user holds the Administrator role or the User role, therefore sitemap security trimming can pick this up?

Answer 1

By implementing your custom Role Provider. Once implemented you can easily use the ASP.NET role provider framework....

Roles.IsUserInRole("Admin");
Roles.GetUsersInRole("Users");

etc.

You can implement a Role Provider by implementing the RoleProvider abstract class or by extending an existing one such as SqlRoleProvider. There's a lot of extensive documentation out there. I'll paste a couple of links

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa478950.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/28546/Active-Directory-Roles-Provider