Skip to main content

How to authenticate a console app to an ASP.NET MVC 4 web site

Image
By

In this post I will show you how to authenticate an application to an ASP.NET MVC web site that uses forms authentication. This sounds a bit weird, but as I found out on the web, this is a fairly common thing to do these days.

The most common scenario where people want to do this is, is when they want to consume an ASP.NET MVC web site as if it was a Web API, to get resources that are already in place and are accessible thru controller’s actions.

There is couple of ways of doing this, and it is pretty easy until you need to authenticate the request in order to get those resources. 

The web site we are working on uses Forms Authentication, this means that when a request arrives, the ASP.NET infrastructure is going to see if this request is authenticated or not, if is not, it will redirect the request to the login page. While this works fine for web pages, is not so good for APIs. Down below I’ll show how to authenticate a client to a login page using the HttpClient class. 

* note: I'm assuming that you 're familiar with the with the "internet app templete" that comes with asp.net mvc 4.0, If not, grab the sample project from this post and take a look at the AccountController class.

This is how you can authenticate a request that otherwise it would be redirected to a login page. 



Once you have done that, you have client that can issue authenticated requests to your website. 



* note that I’m using the same HttpClient instance that executed the login request. If you don’t do it this way, it won’t work at all.

You can get the sample app from github https://github.com/amiralles/http-client-forms-auth

The repository contains a solution with two projects, an ASP.NET MCV 4 web site and a console app that consume the web site as if it was an API.

The web site it's also published on Windows Azure, so you can test the code in an environment other than localhost. Just change this line in the console app config.


Labels:

Comments

  1. KiquenetMarch 11, 2015 at 4:32 AM

    Working for Unit test too? the unit test (MSTest) consume the web site as if it was an API?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AmirallesMarch 11, 2015 at 11:01 AM

      Hmm, I'm clueless on this one; and to be honest, I never have used MSTest. Most .NET testing frameworks suck big time when it comes to async stuff, so I'll guess, no; but I'll go to give it a try and let you know if it works out.

      PS: While I do most of my work using TDD, In general I tend to focus on domain logic rather than HTTP calls, so keep in mind I'm not an expert on that subject.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Migrating an ASP.NET MVC 4 app from Azure websites to WinHost

By
About a week ago I've to migrate an ASP.NET MVC 4/EF5 application from Azure websites to WinHost. While the process was really smooth, there were some caveats related to database connections that I want to share with you. Create and setup the ftp profile on VS and configure the connection string was really easy, WinHost provide you those values and there is nothing special here. But once you deploy your website and try to see it online, you may get the “yellow screen of dead” with the message: "A network-related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. (provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 - Error Locating Server/Instance Specified)" Assuming you wrote the connection string properly, this happens because you cannot use the default connection name in your web.c...
2 comments
Read more

How to show excel files inside the .NET Webbrowser Control

By
If you are reading this, chances are you been banging your head against the wall for a couple of hours (or even days) trying to show excel files inside the WinForms webbrowser control. Possible reasons you ended up in here: You had working code that got broke after upgrading from Win 7. Your code doesn’t work the same way between machines running different (newer) versions of IE. A download box pops up every time your app tries to show an excel file inside the webbrowser control (you wanna show the actual content). You just have no clue on how to get excel working into the .NET embedded webbrowser control. You are trying to implement IInternetSecurityManager and don’t know where to start. (Or how don’t know how to delegate calls to your security manager). Among many other, maybe….. Yes, COM is a PITA, so is ActiveX and IE (Embedded or full for that matter). And no, showing excel files inside the webbrowser control shouldn’t be that hard, but sometimes we have...
3 comments
Read more

How to replace text with images on Word documents using C#

By
This post it’s a reply to a question I got from a previous post that shows how to work with Word templates from C# code . If you haven’t read it, I recommend to do so because I’m not going into details here. But basically it was about how to create a Word document from a template and perform same text manipulation. So, the question from Marcel Kieboom  was “Do you know if it would be also possible to replace one of the words with an image which is locally stored?” The answer is yes, and this is how you can do that. Based on the same convention I had used in the previous post, I should have a template like this: What I’m trying to do here is replace the text [angus-young] for an actual pic of Angus. The technique I’m using it’s pretty common on web sites and basically consist in have an image with a matching name for each keyword I want to replace and then create the image path dynamically. This is the C# code to do that. * When I execute t...
19 comments
Read more