Forms Authenticaition and Connect using Facebook or Twitter

Hi!

I assume you know how to authenticate with Facebook and Twitter using their respective API.

After you have authenticated the user, you can set your own cookie using

FormsAuthentication.RedirectFromLoginPage(facebookUserId, IsPersistent); // redirect to default logged in page

or

FormsAuthentication.SetAuthCookie(facebookUserId, false); // If you do not need to redirect to another page

More information can be seen here:
1) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ka5ffkce(v=VS.90).aspx
2) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.web.security.formsauthentication.setauthcookie(v=VS.90).aspx
3) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff647070.aspx

Hi,

Thanks for the great examples and comments.

You have given fantastic direction but we are unsure of how the Facebook username associates with the underlying authentication module.
Normally, we would:

  1. Pass username to .net forms authentication (as with your example)
  2. Use the Application Authentication events to check the user details and assign roles to the Principal.

However, when you use Facebook and/or Twitter authentication, these details have no relation to our underlying system (e.g. roles - admin, user, guest).
So, do we:

  1. Have user login to the members area.
  2. Have them authenticate with Facebook/Twitter and then STORE their details against their member information (account).
  3. Then, when they return and sign-in with Facebook/Twitter we simply LOOKUP member account information using the Facebook/Twitter ID.
  4. Then, get their native username and authenticate as you would normally (as well as reassigning userid to the native one for identity, principal and context)


Hope this makes sense as I would really love to get on top of this algorithm.

Thanks kindly for your time.

Steve

 

Great feedback. Thanks.