User.IsInRole return false

Question

I 'm using Identity 2 for authentication in mvc 5 web site. In my view i want check the role of the user :

@if(User.IsInRole("Customers"))
{
  @*do something*@
}

but this always return false, I have already set <roleManager enabled="true" /> in the web config. any help please.

Answer 1

I just got it to work with my setup that is also using Identity Framework.

I added a user to a role by using the following code:

this.RoleManager.CreateAsync(new Role() {Name  = "Customers"});

this.UserManager.AddToRoleAsync(this.User.Identity.GetUserId<int>(), "Amazing");

Then any time after that, when I ran User.IsInRole("Customers"); it returned false, that was until I relogged them back in.

You need to re-log in the user after having added the user to the role. The role information is stored in the cookies.

I ran the following to log the user again:

var user = await this.UserManager.FindByNameAsync("bob");
var identity = await this.UserManager.CreateIdentityAsync(user, DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ApplicationCookie);

this.AuthManager.SignIn(new AuthenticationProperties() { IsPersistent = true }, identity);

From this point, User.IsInRole("Customers") worked for me and returned true.

This won't work though unless you can verify within your application that it is aware of the role that you want to add them to. You can verify the existence of the role "Customers" by using your RoleManager in the following way:

var roleExists = (this.RoleManager.FindByNameAsync("Customers").Result != null);

Answer 2

I have the same problem since I customize the IdentityDbContext class. And the reason why the User.IsInRole("Customers") is always false in my case is because I have the EF lazy loading turned off on my custom context class. I tried to turn on the lazy loading than I logged out and then in, and the User.IsInRole is returning the expected value.

public partial class Context : IdentityDbContext<User>
    {
        public Context() : base("name=Context")
        {
            this.Configuration.LazyLoadingEnabled = true;          
        }