Plone and Asp.Net Integration

Question

How to:

• Make an Asp.Net application to recognize a plone authenticated user (his/her id, roles and any other available data) and vice-versa?
• Show plone contents inside my asp.net application or show some application-specific data inside plone?
• Insert plone contents from inside an asp.net application?

Answer 1

There are a couple of high level approaches:

Security:

• Put a web server in front of both Plone and the ASP.net application and use the auth_tkt cookie format. Apache and nginx support this, for example, and Plone 4 has built-in auth_tkt cookie format support.
• Use a shared ActiveDirectory/LDAP repository to share account id, roles, etc.

Content:

• Use something like ore.contentmirror to export content from Plone to a database and render through the ASP.NET application
• Use a Plone view to render only what you want and either scrape this into the ASP.NET application or use an <iframe /> to render it.
• Use Diazo (XDV) at the web server level to merge the two applications visually - this will work best if entire areas of the site are to be served by Plone rather than just pulling in some content here and there.