User Areas

Cofoundry allows you to define custom User Areas so you can create member only areas or enhanced experiences for your signed-up users.

The Cofoundry admin panel is itself a user area and so you can benefit from the same level of security and features such as roles, permission, password recovery and auditing.

Defining a User Area

You create a new user area by creating a class that inherits from IUserAreaDefinition:

using Cofoundry.Domain;

public class MemberUserArea : IUserAreaDefinition
{
    public static string AreaCode = "MEM";

    /// <summary>
    /// Indicates if users in this area can login using a password. If this is false
    /// the password field will be null and login will typically be via SSO or some 
    /// other method.
    /// </summary>
    public bool AllowPasswordLogin { get; } = true;

    /// <summary>
    /// Display name of the area, used in the Cofoundry admin panel
    /// as the navigation link to manage your users
    /// </summary>
    public string Name { get; } = "Site Members";

    /// <summary>
    /// Indicates whether the user should login using thier email address as the username.
    /// Some SSO systems might provide only a username and not an email address so in
    /// this case the email address is allowed to be null.
    /// </summary>
    public bool UseEmailAsUsername { get; } = true;

    /// <summary>
    /// A unique 3 letter code identifying this user area. The cofoundry 
    /// user are uses the code "COF" so you can pick anything else!
    /// </summary>
    public string UserAreaCode { get; } = AreaCode;
    
    /// <summary>
    /// The url to redirect to to when not authenticated.
    /// </summary>
    public string LoginPath { get; } = "/admin/auth/login";
    
    /// <summary>
    /// Cofoundry creates an auth schema for each user area. Use this property to set this
    /// user area as the default auth schema, which means the HttpContext.User property will 
    /// be set to this identity.
    /// </summary>
    public bool IsDefaultAuthSchema { get; } = false;
}

This definition class will be registered by the DI container and set up automatically. A new section for managing the users in your user area will be added to the admin panel.

Working with a custom user area

Cofoundry provides a number of ways to work with your user data, but it's up to you to log users in and manage the ways they interact with your site.

We'll be adding more thorough documentation at a later date, but for now the SPASite sample is a good example of working with a custom User Area.