Asp.net core DefaultIdentity with DefaultUI and custom UserStore

SelAromDotNet 1

I have created an asp.net core .net 6 website and on setup selected the option for individual accounts. It scaffolded up the EF identity, which I do not want to use...

through various trial and error, I've managed to implement the custom classes like UserStore to authenticate against my custom provider and it's getting there...

however I wanted to keep the DefaultUI it registers to leverage the login/user management features it provides. Unfortunately, this implementation seems to heavily rely on specific defaults and implementations of the EF version of Identity, such as IUserPhoneNumberStore and IUserAuthenticatorKeyStore for two factor authentication.

looking at the scaffolded bits of the Identity as shown here (https://andrewlock.net/customising-aspnetcore-identity-without-editing-the-pagemodel/) these features are indeed non-optional components of the default UI...

It appears I have three options: 1) implement all of these features in the user store even though I don't want to use them so the pages load and maybe use CSS to hide them in the ui 2) scaffold these pages and remove these dependencies or 3) build my own UI, which is basically option 2 but with more work...

This feels like an oversight to me; wasn't the entire point of Identity to make this plug and play and/or customizeable based on the features implemented? I see in some of the identity code it checks for these features (like if (this.userManager is IUserPhoneNumberStore) to skip unused features) but the UI pages are not doing this, and simply expect these to be present.

Is this intentionally done, and if so what is the reason to so tightly couple it to this setup specifically? I noticed the Add Scaffolded Item feature in VS also requires a data context, even though I'm not using one, so this supports the idea that Default UI is specifically only designed to be used with EF's identity implementation...

or is it perhaps something that just hasn't been done yet, and I could maybe do a PR for to add such checks, would such a change be valid and/or useful?

do I have any other options here? is there another UI that doesn't have such coupling?

many thanks!

SelAromDotNet 1 Reputation point

2022-07-13T04:21:57.23+00:00

looking at some of the other examples of identity providers here: https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/tree/main/src/Identity

it appears that indeed they do implement their own pages to leverage the providers used, such as this manager index for document db: https://github.com/codekoenig/AspNetCore.Identity.DocumentDb/blob/master/Samples/IdentitySample.Mvc/Views/Manage/Index.cshtml

. it appears option 2 is my best bet, and perhaps someday I can package these up into its own provider for my backend (back4app) for others to use and contribute to...

still, it would be nice if the defaultui had some support to enable/disable things based on the implemented userstore... if this can be done and I'm just missing it, do let me know!

thanks
SelAromDotNet 1 Reputation point

2022-07-13T05:14:50.71+00:00

interestingly, I also discovered this resource: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/security/authentication/cookie?view=aspnetcore-6.0

which let's me implement a MUCH simpler authentication using cookies. I can login using the back4app api and set the claims directly, without any need for any bloated user stores or interfaces I have no use for...

this worked a treat! once I have this fully running I'll put together a blog or something to share the details (tho I'd still like to implement an identity provider for this, that actually sounds fun :))
Farid Uddin Kiron MSFT 456 Reputation points Microsoft Vendor

2022-07-14T01:37:55.087+00:00

Hello @SelAromDotNet does this document explains your concern as expected? Do you still have any further issue here? It seems you have successfully able to implement your custom requirement.
SelAromDotNet 1 Reputation point

2022-07-14T02:28:19.067+00:00

so here's another interesting snag I could use further insight on: the site i created is actually a server side blazor project... so although I can use the forms authentication, I have to do so using the old Razor pages (.cshtml), not the blazor components (.razor) because I can't find a way to handle the POST from the form that logs the user in.

even the identity example i created uses razor cshtml pages, taking the user out of the blazor app, so this appears to be the way it's supposed to work...

but is it? it's awkward to show the user a different page, especially since I can't reuse the _layouts from the blazor site in the razor page for a consistent look without duplicating a layout for that platform...

would love to get a better understanding of how people are doing this and/or how it's supposed to be done.
SelAromDotNet 1 Reputation point

2022-07-14T02:37:26.24+00:00

thanks for the reply! I posted this before I saw it sorry, thanks for looking in, while I was able to move forward, the update in my post below has thrown me a bit, do you have any insight on this?