Hi Vince,

Thanks for a great book which has given me plenty of ideas for a framework I'm designing for our company.

I have a question regarding the role based security and menu item implementation.

From a design point of view, can you give me an insight as to why a bespoke design was used instead of extending the membership and role providers that come with asp.net?

I'm thinking that it has something to do with being able to restrict user actions down to the capability grain? At the moment I'm leaning towards extending the built in providers and was wondering if you'd experienced any gotchas if/when using them for an enterprise framework implementation?

Cheers.

Any chance of a reply on this one?

thinster, I cant answer on behalf of Vince, he hasnt been around lately. Anyway, I was thinking of creating some custom interfaces to Menu editing from a design view, sort of how the Code Generator works.

The one gotcha that I can tell you about from experience is that it gets really cumbersome when using the design used in this framework. You manually edit the db then you have to clean the dll's and rebuild for them to take effect. Make sit hard to keep your libraries in sync.

Best of luck.

thinster,

I cant answer on behalf of Vince, he hasnt been around lately. Anyway, I was thinking of creating some custom interfaces to Menu editing from a design view, sort of how the Code Generator works.

The one gotcha that I can tell you about from experience is that it gets really cumbersome when using the design used in this framework. You manually edit the db then you have to clean the dll's and rebuild for them to take effect. Make sit hard to keep your libraries in sync.

Best of luck.

thinster,

I cant answer on behalf of Vince, he hasnt been around lately. Anyway, I was thinking of creating some custom interfaces to Menu editing from a design view, sort of how the Code Generator works.

The one gotcha that I can tell you about from experience is that it gets really cumbersome when using the design used in this framework. You manually edit the db then you have to clean the dll's and rebuild for them to take effect. Makes it hard to keep your libraries in sync.

Best of luck.

thinster,

I cant answer on behalf of Vince, he hasnt been around lately. Anyway, I was thinking of creating some custom interfaces to Menu editing from a design view, sort of how the Code Generator works.

The one gotcha that I can tell you about from experience is that it gets really cumbersome when using the design used in this framework. You manually edit the db then you have to clean the dll's and rebuild for them to take effect. Makes it hard to keep your libraries in sync.

Best of luck.

Thinster,

The asp.net out-of-the-box role can handle the job just fine, but it can quickly be a problem when you need to change a users role and/or level of permission of a page.

Z, I agree, manually adding/maintaining menu items and capabilities directly via sql..!!!! YA RIGHT..!!! This got old real quick..!!!
I changed the MenuItems and Capability in the BLL to inherit from the BaseEO and allow Add, Edit, Delete. In doing this you'll want to:

• Add Validation for deleting
• Check for IsDuplicate
• Create a button on the Grid page to 'Reload' the Load methods in Globals. This will update everything instantly.

You can then set a capability for the grid and edit page for this and only allow 'Developer' role or whomever access to these pages.

My only gripe that was left out was a BreadCrumbs control for the Menu Items. That would have been a nice final touch. This is something I had to add to my TODO list and haven't gotten to it yet.

Good luck,
Ronnie

Thanks for the reply guys - some interesting points. I did wonder why a read only BLL was implemented as it did seem like something which would need administration by developers/admins etc.

I'll definately go with Ronnie's suggestions as well - The breadcrumbs would be a nice touch - I'll be sure to post if I get round to that any time soon,

Thanks again