More on the ASP.NET Development

As it was a public holiday in the UK on Monday I spent most of it on the website project. I made a break through in that I got my own dynamic menu system working. ASP.NET does provide a menu control but I wanted something that fitted in with my design. Part of the problem was I wanted something fast and didn't want to spend a lot of time playing around with html/css design templates- that can waste a lot of time.

The site started using a pre-designed open source website template called MultiFlex 3. I had all the css/html and it had a nice menu. So I dissected all of the menu elements html, created a menu class and basically put the menu together in a StringBuilder. Also the menu included code to check that the user was logged in and if a logged in user was a Site Admin. The two methods below show how to do this this.

       public bool IsLoggedIn() {
           return (HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.IsAuthenticated) ;
       }

       public bool IsSiteAdmin()
       {
           return (IsLoggedIn() && HttpContext.Current.User.IsInRole ("Site Admin")) ;
       }


This allows access to the all important Admin pages to be restricted by having this in the Page_Load event. below (This is the code that runs when the page has loaded).

    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
      menus m= new menus() ;
      if (!m.IsSiteAdmin())
      {
          Response.Redirect("sign-in.aspx") ;
      }
    }


If you're not a Site Administrator this redirects you to the sign-in page. Arguably it should redirect unauthenticated users there and authenticated non-Admins elsewhere. I'll add that in...

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