I noticed that the web.config of iMIS 15 has the Membership and Profile providers setup along with the corresponding tables in the database. How much are these providers used in native iMIS? Are these providers that we, as developers, can use? If so, what features are supported and what are not.
Thanks,
Neil
Is there more documentation on these 2 services? We would like to use these as part of our already designed sites. How extensible are they? Is there a service for other areas, or is that still only Public View and iBOs. I saw the list of commands that the service has, but I would like more information on this. Do you have more documentation on this?
Christopher W. Marsch, Database Administrator
MEMA
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The membership and profile providers are just standard .Net SqlMembership and SqlProfile providers, so you can get documentation on those on the MSDN site. As I said, if you use them directly you won't get integration with the iMIS login logic (prior to 15.1; this means Expiration Dates won't be respected when validating a login, for example), but the username/password will be the same.
If you do want to integrate the iMIS login logic you'll need to use the Membership Web Service; in general this just wraps the two providers and gives you access to them from client applications (for example iMIS Desktop), but in some cases (such as the Login methods) it does those additional checks for expired accounts etc.
There isn't really additional documentation on the web service yet, unfortunately, but if you have specific questions I can try to answer them.
The membership provider is
The membership provider is very heavily used; it's used to verify login/password information for every login. The profile provider isn't used all that much yet (currently it only stores a few values, notably whether IQA should use Basic or Advanced mode by default for each user).
You can absolutely use the providers for your own projects. The providers we use prior to 15.1 are standard out-of-the-box SqlMembership and SqlProfile providers, so everything should be supported, with one caveat:
The membership provider does not check expiration dates etc in the iMIS database; it only checks to see whether the user ID exists, the password matches, and the user is not locked out. If you want to tie in with the iMIS login logic you'll need to use the membership web service, use iBO.Net, or directly check dates/Disabled flags in the database yourself.
Starting in 15.1 we will actually provide our own custom membership provider, which does do all the iMIS expiration date logic checks, so you'll be able to directly use that provider and still get all the same logic as the membership web service. We anticipate possibly creating a custom profile provider at some future date, although there's no set date or confirmed project for this yet.