Hi,

I have been developing modules, providers etc. for the last few year for DNN 4 and 5. But when I had to create custom role and membership
providers while using external databases and web services, I ran across a few very annoying "features" that seem to be very hard to bypass.
 

• DNN is getting some information from database views, like vw_UserRoles and vw_TabPermissions, which means that if either DNN Users or
  Roles tables are empty, those view query based features and functions don't work.
• DNN supports only integers as role and user ids, so using guids or other values in an external database is useless, unless you create
  mapping tables and link those ids together in the providers (not the major problem and maybe not possible to change without greater harm done)
• DNN is sometimes querying for roles by (seemingly) hardcoded value(s), like "Administrator" even though the role provider doesn't
  offer a role with that name

 

Is there anyone who have any suggestions as to how to bypass these things, without creating e.g. users and roles to DNN's tables with similar values as the ones in the external database? It's not a hard job, but it doesn't sound like it should be... checking every time when a user logs in or someone is adding a new user based tab permission, if that user or that role already exists in DNN's table, and if not, creating them. I would appreciate if there is some kind of useful solution, instead of these solutions I have found.

Why would DNN have a provider architecture if you're not supposed to add or replace providers? As far as I understand, that's the whole point of having providers in the first place.

I am having the same exact problem.  I have implemented the membership provider and it works great.  The only issue I am having is with the role provider I am implementing.  It seems that even though the role methods called in my custom provider, that the DNN core somehow still looks at its "Roles" table for the roles and thus my menu tabs aren't really aligned to the users correct roles.  I only seem to be half way implemented.  Have you found any kind of a solution?  I am stumped with this problem and can't find a solution.  Here is a link to my current post waiting for an answer. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/89/threadid/390057/scope/posts/Default.aspx