The information used to identify a user - her username and password, for example - are referred to as credentials. This tutorial series focuses on forms authentication , which is an authentication model where users log in to the site by providing their credentials in a web page form.
We have all experienced this type of authentication before. Go to any eCommerce site. When you are ready to check out you are asked to log in by entering your username and password into textboxes on a web page. In addition to identifying clients, a server may need to limit what resources or functionalities are accessible depending on the client making the request. Authorization is the process of determining whether a particular user has the authority to access a specific resource or functionality.
A user account is a store for persisting information about a particular user. User accounts must minimally include information that uniquely identifies the user, such as the user's login name and password. Along with this essential information, user accounts may include things like: When using forms authentication, user account information is typically stored in a relational database like Microsoft SQL Server.
Web applications that support user accounts may optionally group users into roles. A role is simply a label that is applied to a user and provides an abstraction for defining authorization rules and page-level functionality. For example, a website might include an Administrator role with authorization rules that prohibit anyone but an Administrator to access a particular set of web pages. Moreover, a variety of pages that are accessible to all users including non-Administrators might display additional data or offer extra functionality when visited by users in the Administrators role.
Using roles, we can define these authorization rules on a role-by-role basis rather than user-by-user. NET page, an image, a JavaScript file, or any other type of content. The web server is tasked with returning the requested content.
In doing so, it must determine a number of things about the request, including who made the request and whether the identity is authorized to retrieve the requested content. By default, browsers send HTTP requests that lack any sort of identification information. But if the browser does include authentication information then the web server starts the authentication workflow, which attempts to identify the client making the request.
The steps of the authentication workflow depend on the type of authentication being used by the web application. NET supports three types of authentication: Windows, Passport, and forms. This tutorial series focuses on forms authentication, but let's take a minute to compare and contrast Windows authentication user stores and workflow. All three techniques work in roughly the same way: The browser then displays a modal dialog box that prompts the user for their username and password see Figure 1.
This information is then sent back to the web server via an HTTP header. The supplied credentials are validated against the web server's Windows User Store. This means that each authenticated user in your web application must have a Windows account in your organization. This is commonplace in intranet scenarios. In fact, when using Windows Integrated Authentication in an intranet setting, the browser automatically provides the web server with the credentials used to log on to the network, thereby suppressing the dialog box shown in Figure 1.
While Windows authentication is great for intranet applications, it is usually unfeasible for Internet applications since you do not want to create Windows accounts for each and every user who signs up at your site. Forms authentication, on the other hand, is ideal for Internet web applications. Recall that forms authentication identifies the user by prompting them to enter their credentials through a web form.
Consequently, when a user attempts to access an unauthorized resource, they are automatically redirected to the login page where they can enter their credentials. The submitted credentials are then validated against a custom user store - usually a database. After verifying the submitted credentials, a forms authentication ticket is created for the user.
This ticket indicates that the user has been authenticated and includes identifying information, such as the username. The forms authentication ticket is typically stored as a cookie on the client computer. Therefore, subsequent visits to the website include the forms authentication ticket in the HTTP request, thereby enabling the web application to identify the user once they have logged in.
Figure 2 illustrates the forms authentication workflow from a high-level vantage point. Notice how the authentication and authorization pieces in ASP. NET act as two separate entities. The forms authentication system identifies the user or reports that they are anonymous. The authorization system is what determines whether the user has access to the requested resource.
If the user is unauthorized as they are in Figure 2 when attempting to anonymously visit ProtectedPage. Once the user has successfully logged in, subsequent HTTP requests include the forms authentication ticket.
The forms authentication system merely identifies the user - it is the authorization system that determines whether the user can access the requested resource. We will dig into forms authentication in much greater detail in the next two tutorials, An Overview of Forms Authentication and Forms Authentication Configuration and Advanced Topics. For more on ASP.
NET includes two ways to determine whether a particular user has authority to access a specific file or directory:. NET pages in a particular directory. Using these techniques we can instruct ASP. NET to deny requests to a particular page for a particular user, or allow access to a set of users and deny access to everyone else. What about scenarios where all of the users can access the page, but the page's functionality depends on the user? For example, many sites that support user accounts have pages that display different content or data for authenticated users versus anonymous users.
An anonymous user might see a link to log in to the site, whereas an authenticated user would instead see a message like, Welcome back, Username along with a link to log out. Such page-level adjustments can be accomplished declaratively or programmatically. To show different content for anonymous than authenticated users, simply drag a LoginView control onto your page and enter the appropriate content into its AnonymousTemplate and LoggedInTemplate templates.
Alternatively, you can programmatically determine whether the current request is authenticated, who the user is, and what roles they belong to if any. You can use this information to then show or hide columns in a grid or Panels on the page. This series includes three tutorials that focus on authorization. User-Based Authorization examines how to limit access to a page or pages in a directory for specific user accounts; Role-Based Authorization looks at supplying authorization rules at the role level; lastly, the Displaying Content Based on the Currently Logged In User tutorial explores modifying a particular page's content and functionality based on the user visiting the page.
NET's forms authentication provides an infrastructure for users to log in to a site and have their authenticated state remembered across page visits. Neither feature, however, supplies a means for storing user account information or managing roles. They were also on the hook for designing the user interfaces and writing the code for essential user account-related pages like the login page and the page to create a new account, among others.
Without any built-in user account framework in ASP. NET, each developer implementing user accounts had to arrive at his own design decisions on questions like, How do I store passwords or other sensitive information? Today, implementing user accounts in an ASP. NET application is much simpler thanks to the Membership framework and the built-in Login Web controls.
The Membership framework is a handful of classes in the System. In the demo configurator RadWindow's shortcuts can be chosen via the dropdowns and buttons.
The full list of commands is available in the related help article and the available key combinations are chosen for the sake of simplicity and are not limited to the ones in the dropdown. About Pricing Try now. Alert, Confirm and Prompt. User Interactions Close, Resize, etc. Opener and Offset Elements. Return Values from a Dialog. Edit Dialog for RadGrid. Window - Keyboard Navigation. Add a shortcut through the dropdowns for this RadWindow. This is done via JavaScript and will not be in effect if the RadWindow is disposed.
If this happens the available shortcuts are the ones defined for the RadWindowManager.
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