Active Directory Authentication & Custom Roles

I havent worked on ActiveDirectory Membership provider earlier, I have a doubt on creating an application using AD membership provider. If I need to foreign reference a user in a different table开发者_开发知识库(lets say a custom role table ) then what primary identifier(Foreign key) should I use to identify the user in the the table which holds the relation of Role and the users.

Also , where is the additional information(other than AD details) about the user is stored like User Name, Department, Current project etc.

Is a snapshot of Active directory taken frequently and stored in a table in the database which is then used in sql joins?

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The base membership provider (and derived providers such as the ActiveDirectoryMembershipProvider) uses UserName as a functional key (queries for members expect UserName as the key query parameter and return a single MembershipUser object). Those queries return MemberShipUser objects that have basic membership information—including roles, email, comments, etc. If you want to combine the ADMembership Provider with extra information, you're best off using the UserName as the key to do so. Storing extra data is easier if you use a database because .UpdateUser only commits Email, Comment, and IsApproved properties.

And no, snapshots are not taken, though you can enable caching if you wish. The provider queries AD directly when it needs the information.

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The aspnet membership database when created resides in App_Data folder and is quite handy as it supports all the Login controls very well. The user roles can be very well managed by the aspnet configuration manager. The profile properties are managed all by the the database itself.

The database thus created can be seen in the server connections. If you analyze the datatbase you will see that every user has a specific userId apart from the username. Both of them are unique. You need not copy all user data in other tables. You can specify the related data using joins. Once a user is logged in, you can refer him/her by User.Identity.Name (c#) in your code behind.

Kindly view the database tables using the Server Explorer in Visual Studio and you can view the tables structures -- aspnet_Users, aspnet_Membership, aspnet_Profile etc...