Ok - so I haven't been keeping this Blog up-to-date.
As you will see, I do have a good excuse. Over the last three months I have been pounding away at some very significant changes to the membership/roles/provider components of DotNetNuke.
In planning what we would be doing in this cycle, it became clear at quite an early stage, that a lot of the enhancments regarding membership, roles and profile would be quite a challenge to implement using the MS MemberRole functionality.
For anyone who has delved into the code around these components it is clear that we already use a "hybrid" approach - ie we extend the MS functionality by providing our own Business Layer objects as well as our own Data Structures in SQL Server.
A decision was made in December, that the focus of this release cycle would be a major overhaul of these components, and it was felt that the best approach would be to abstract our dependency on the MS components.
So, what does this mean?
It means that in version 3.3 (and 4.1), there will be no direct use of the various MS MemberRole components in the core DotNetNuke assembly. This will be accomplished in the following way:
- Creation of new Abstract Providers
- membershipProvider
- roleProvider
- profileProvider
- Creation of a concrete implementation (using the MS MemberRole components).
- AspNetMembershipProvider
- AspNetRoleProvider
- AspNetProfileProvider
- Move all MemberRole specific code to the relevant concrete providers
- Update (and add where neccessary) Business Layer methods to use the new abstract providers.
- Remove all direct references to the MS MemberRole that occur in the UI layer, and replace them with DotNetNuke Business Layer method calls
The result of this abstraction should be transparent to most users - as the default provider will be the AspNet providers. It is purely an "implementation" change. However, the DotNetNuke core no longer references the MemberRole components and developers are free to build their own concrete implementations.
This is the first stage of the changes in this area - and have been in internal testing now for a few weeks. In future blogs I will be discussing some of the upcoming enhancements (and new supporting controls), that we believe will take DotNetNuke to the next level in its membership management capabilities.