Configure Microsoft.AspNet.Identity to allow email address as username

Question

I\'m in the process of creating a new application and started out using EF6-rc1, Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.Core 1.0.0-rc1, Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework 1.0.0-rc

Answer 1

I was also stuck with this because most of the time usernames are E-mails these days, I can understand the reasoning of a separate E-mail field though. These are purely my thoughts / experience as I also could not find Microsoft's say on this.

Remember, Asp Identity is purely to identify someone, you don't have to have an E-mail to be identified but they allow us to store it because it forms part of an identity. When you create a new web project in visual studio, you are given the option for authentication options.

If you select a non empty project type such as MVC and set authentication to "Individual accounts" then you are given the basic underpinnings for user management. One of which includes a sub class looking like this within App_Start\IdentityConfig.cs:

 // Configure the application user manager used in this application. UserManager is defined in ASP.NET Identity and is used by the application.
public class ApplicationUserManager : UserManager
{
    public ApplicationUserManager(IUserStore store)
        : base(store)
    {
    }

    public static ApplicationUserManager Create(IdentityFactoryOptions options, IOwinContext context) 
    {
        var manager = new ApplicationUserManager(new UserStore(context.Get()));
        // Configure validation logic for usernames
        manager.UserValidator = new UserValidator(manager)
        {
            AllowOnlyAlphanumericUserNames = false,
            RequireUniqueEmail = true
        };
    }
    //N.B rest of code removed
}

What this tells us is that Microsoft intend us to store more complex usernames (refer to AllowOnlyAlphaNumericUserNames = false), so really we have mixed signals.

The fact this is generated from a default web project gives us a good indication / direction from Microsoft (and a clean way) to enable us to enter E-mails for the username field. It's clean because the static create method is used within the App_Start\Startup.Auth.cs when bootstrapping the application with the Microsoft.OWIN context.

The only down side to this approach is you end up storing the E-mail twice.... Which is not good!