How to get current user who's accessing an ASP.NET application?

Question

To get the current logged in user at the system I use this code:

string opl = System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name.ToString();
         


        

Answer 1

The general consensus answer above seems to have have a compatibility issue with CORS support. In order to use the HttpContext.Current.User.Identity.Name attribute you must disable anonymous authentication in order to force Windows authentication to provide the authenticated user information. Unfortunately, I believe you must have anonymous authentication enabled in order to process the pre-flight OPTIONS request in a CORS scenario.

You can get around this by leaving anonymous authentication enabled and using the HttpContext.Current.Request.LogonUserIdentity attribute instead. This will return the authenticated user information (assuming you are in an intranet scenario) even with anonymous authentication enabled. The attribute returns a WindowsUser data structure and both are defined in the System.Web namespace

        using System.Web;
        WindowsIdentity user;
        user  = HttpContext.Current.Request.LogonUserIdentity;

Answer 2

Don't look too far.

If you develop with ASP.NET MVC, you simply have the user as a property of the Controller class. So in case you get lost in some models looking for the current user, try to step back and to get the relevant information in the controller.

In the controller, just use:

using Microsoft.AspNet.Identity;

  ...

  var userId = User.Identity.GetUserId();
  ...

with userId as a string.