Are there any implementations of ASP.NET Identitity that have another level above account?

Question

I am using ASP.NET Identity. It works well but I would like to add in a parent to the AspNetUsers table. In my case I would like to have each user belong to an organization. At this point I am just looking for some ideas to see if others have seen implementations that would allow this.

Has anyone seen any implementations that do this. I would like to get some tips on how I could implement this functionality.

Answer 1

I'm presuming you are using default EF implementation of Identity storage.

Identity is very flexible and can be bent into many shapes to suit your needs.

If you are looking for a simple parent-child relationship, where every user would have a parent record (such as Company), one of the ways to implement that is to add company reference to user class:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations;
using System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.Schema;
using Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework;


public class ApplicationUser : IdentityUser
{
    public ApplicationUser()
    {
    }

    [ForeignKey("CompanyId")]
    public Company Company { get; set; }
    public int CompanyId { get; set; }
}


public class Company
{
    [Key, DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)]
    public int CompanyId { get; set; }
    public String Name { get; set; }

    public virtual ICollection<ApplicationUser> Users { get; set; }
}

This will put a foreign key on users to companies. But from here next course of action depends on what is required in your application. I would imagine that you'll have some sort of restriction for users depending on what company they belong to. For quick company retrieval you can store CompanyId in a claim when logging in the user.
Default implementation of ApplicationUser has GenerateUserIdentityAsync method. You can modify this as following:

    public async Task<ClaimsIdentity> GenerateUserIdentityAsync(UserManager<ApplicationUser> manager)
    {
        // Note the authenticationType must match the one defined in CookieAuthenticationOptions.AuthenticationType
        var userIdentity = await manager.CreateIdentityAsync(this, DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ApplicationCookie);
        // Add custom user claims here
        identity.AddClaim(new Claim("CompanyId", CompanyId.ToString()));
        return userIdentity;
    }

Then on every request you'll be able to access this CompanyId claim from the cookie:

    public static int GetCompanyId(this IPrincipal principal)
    {
        var claimsPrincipal = principal as ClaimsPrincipal;
        //TODO check if claims principal is not null

        var companyIdString = claimsPrincipal.Claims.FirstOrDefault(c => c.Type == "CompanyId");
        //TODO check if the string is not null

        var companyId = int.Parse(companyIdString); //TODO this possibly can explode. Do some validation
        return companyId;
    }

And then you'll be able to call this extension method from almost anywhere of your web application: HttpContext.Current.User.GetCompanyId()