Forms Auth: have different credentials for a subdirectory?
- by Fyodor Soikin
My website has forms authentication, and all is well. Now I want to create a subdirectory and have it also password-protected, but! I need the subdirectory to use a completely different set of logins/passwords than the whole website uses.
Say, for example, I have users for the website stored in the "Users" table in a database. But for the subdirectory, I want the users to be taken from the "SubdirUsers" table. Which probably has a completely different structure.
Consequently, I need the logins to be completely parallel, as in:
Logging into the whole website does not make you logged into the subdirectory as well
Clicking "logout" on the whole website does not nullify your login in the subdirectory
And vice versa
I do not want to create a separate virtual application for the subdirectory, because I want to share all libraries, user controls, as well as application state and cache. In other words, it has to be the same application.
I also do not want to just add a flag to the "Users" table indicating whether this is a whole website user or the subdirectory user. User lists have to come from different sources.
For now, the only option that I see is to roll my own Forms Auth for the subdirectory.
Anybody can propose a better alternative?