Introduction to ASP.NET Core part 25: user management cont’d

Introduction

In the previous post we started looking into user management in .NET Core MVC. .NET Core provides a number of built-in objects for this purpose: so far we’ve seen IdentityUser to represent the properties of a typical application user, IdentityRole to represent roles and the generic IdentityDbContext of T class to easily connect the application with an SQL Server based identity provider. The built in objects can be customised by deriving a class from them like we did with our UserManagementDbContext and User classes. We also saw how to install and register the EF based identity provider in Startup.cs via the Configure and ConfigureServices methods. We keep the user management related elements separate from the bookstore domain so that users, claims, roles etc. do not intermingle with our core domain.

Currently our demo application doesn’t do anything with users. Any visitor can do anything on the books related pages. We’ll start building out our application around that in this post.

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Introduction to ASP.NET Core part 24: handling users

Introduction

In the previous post we added the EntityFramework repository elements to our demo project. The book entities are now saved in and extracted from a database. We successfully replaced the in-memory placeholder repository with one backed up by SQL Server. We implemented the EF repository so that it has a separate commit function that needs to be called to persist the changes. The service class calling on the repository has an extra step to make but this way it’s possible to call AddNew several times and then CommitChanges only once. We’ll therefore not send a query to the database after each and every call to AddNew but send a single set of instructions instead.

In this post we’ll start looking into how to handle users in .NET Core MVC. We’ll be using the user management features built into .NET Core and EF Core. User management is most often not part of the core business domain and using the well tested built-in security features can save us a lot of time. That is time that we can spend on the real business domain of the application. In addition they can help us with the login and logout process.

We’ll also try and separate the user related elements from the “real” business entities of our application. That is we’ll put the users in a separate database with its own data context and connection string.

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Introduction to ASP.NET Core part 23: the EntityFramework repository

Introduction

In the previous post we started looking into EntityFramework Core. We saw how to install and wire up EF Core using NuGet and Startup.cs. We also discussed the basics of creating a DB context class with a single DB set of the Book domain. The Update-Database command in the package manager detects our DB context class in the project and creates a data migration file. The console also enabled us to create the database and the Books table table using code-first and EF data migrations with the help of the generated migration class. That’s where we can declare in code what type of objects we want to create in the database: tables, indexes, primary keys etc.

The next step is to actually use this database in our demo book store project. We’ll do that in this post.

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Introduction to ASP.NET Core part 22: wiring up EntityFramework Core

Introduction

In the previous post we looked at a new feature in .NET Core called view components. A view component is sort of a mixture between full-blown controllers and partial views. It has its own controller and view but is supposed to be viewed and invoked within a parent view. A view component controller can have its own dependencies injected into it via its constructor just like in the case of “real” controllers. It is a normal C# class which can have its own functions and input parameters. We can implement either the Invoke or InvokeAsync function to return a view depending on whether we want to execute the view component asynchronously or not. The view returned by a view component controller is a cshtml file which will be rendered within a parent view. Thus a view component offers a lot more flexibility than a partial view when breaking out a smaller part of a view.

In this post we’ll start looking at EntityFramework Core which will provide a data store to our application.

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