intergr8 it

The story so far.

Now we are fully integrated for ASPNETdb authentication but we still need a little bit of work to tie this up with the CRM application.  If you run the application now and log in as testuser1, the provider will authenticate the credentials but the portal will have no idea which CRM Contact testuser1 is.  Indeed, the functionality of the Customer Portal will not operate correctly; “testuser1” is not tied up with a CRM Contact so any records created or data retrieved will not be linked.

What we need now is a relationship between the membership provider and the CRM Contact.  To do this we will let the membership provider do the authenticating and then when it’s completed we will find the appropriate CRM Contact.
Once the SqlMembershipProvider has done its work, the ASPNET Login control is configured to call the event handler OnLoggedIn=”Login1_LoggedIn”. Add the stub for this method into Login.cs

protected void Login1_LoggedIn(object sender, EventArgs e){
}

The OnLoggedIn event is only fired when authentication is successful.  For unsuccessful attempts, you could implement  OnLoginError=”Login1_LoginError” and its handler to notify the user that they’re login has failed.

Once we are successfully authenticated, we want to find the corresponding CRM Contact based on the username. We will re-use the schema of the Customer Portal and link the username field of the SqlAuthenticationProvider with the adx_username field of the CRM Contact.

The function LoginContact below uses the XrmContext.ContactSet to find the Contact record with a matching username. Don’t forget to add the Xrm and Linq namespaces to the top of the class file.

using Xrm;
using System.Linq;

private Contact _loginContact;
protected Contact LoginContact
{
get
{
return _loginContact ??
(_loginContact = XrmContext.ContactSet
.FirstOrDefault(c => c.Adx_username == Login1.UserName));
}
}

We can now use LoginContact in our Login1_LoggedIn event handler to confirm that the CRM Contact exists.
protected void Login1_LoggedIn(object sender, EventArgs e){
if (LoginContact == null)
{
//CRM doesn’t have a matching username, Redirect to a Failed login page
}
else
{
// Everything is fine, maybe update the last login date here
}
}

Tie the whole thing together

Browse to your CRM 2011 instance and open up a Contact record.  Jump to the Web Authentication tab and enter the username you set up earlier. Click “Logon Enabled” for completeness and Save the record.

Web Authentication Configuration for the CRM 2011 Customer Portal

Fire up your Customer Portal solution, click Login, enter the user details you set up earlier and away you go.

Whats next…

This implementation is as simple as it gets. There’s no support for managing portal accounts or keeping CRM and the membership provider in sync.  In addition, creating and enabling CRM Contacts for portal access is geared around an invitation process. What if we want our portal to be completely self-servicing?

Next time, we will be adding the support for registering and maintaining a portal account, creating the CRM Contact and gluing the whole thing together.