This has been discussed before. I am looking for response from guys who has tackled this problem smartly and efficiently.

The Context.User is set to SitePrincipal in login.aspx page after we read the user profile from DB.
  Context.User = newUser; <-- static SitePrincipal Object is saved

Now the user get redirected to some other page which inherits from PhilePage base class and its load() gets called. This base class has code:

    if (Context.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
    {
                if (!(Context.User is PhilePrincipal))
                {
                    PhilePrincipal newUser = new PhilePrincipal( Context.User.Identity.Name );
                    Context.User = newUser;
                }
    }

This second check always fails because Context.User is now of type GenericPrincipal even though I set it to SitePrincipal in login page.
This causes to reload the same profile again!!

Is there any way to prevent this reloading by saving Context.User?
What will be the best alternate way to save the user profile-a cookie OR session var or Caching?

Assume that my site will have 1000 users active all the time.

Thanks
Musa

Hello,

To persist it across pages, you can use the Application, Session, or Cache objects, although I don't know what the best solution would be. I would probably recommend Caching, because it is meant for storing large volumes of data.

You could store the name of the user and recreate the object every time you need it, as you do above. You could also persist the object as a static method in a class or module that retrieves the principal object for the current user.

Lot's of ways to tackle the issue, depending on what you want to do.

Brian

I'd use session state for user-specific security info. This gives more separation between users. One a single-server system it will stay in memory if you use in-process session state.

The cache is shared by all users. You can programatically keep them separate, but if there's a bug in your program you might have a security problem.

Eric

The following code will help avoid excessive trips to the database:

SitePrincipal cachedNewUser = (SitePrincipal)Session["cachedNewUser"];
if(!(cachedNewUser == null))
{
Context.User = cachedNewUser;
}
else
{
cachedNewUser = new SitePrincipal( Context.User.Identity.Name );
Session["cachedNewUser"] = cachedNewUser;
Context.User = (SitePrincipal)Session["cachedNewUser"];
}

Warning - You Cannot use absolute URL's for links or redirects, only
relative paths. This is because the User.Context will be set back to
GenericPricipal when Absolute addresses are interpreted by IIS.
I learned this the hard way by coding absolute paths in my Global.asax.cs file and using them in the SiteHeader control.
The original Phile code for SitePage does not suffer from this because the Context.User is being reset (albeit via a trip to the db) EVERY time a page is loaded.

I hope this helps!

Shawn Cohan
info@allsquared.com

cohanshl's method help me

Dear Brian / Shawn Cohan / all members


I hv converted Phile in VS2005 its working fine in local computer,
but problem with remote/web server context.user does not presist identity with page wise.


Please explain what is the best method for overcome with context.user identity page wise.

some one advise me for caching, please explain a little bit how use caching for context.user or any other possible solutions.