Real World SharePoint® 2007: Indispensable Experiences from 16 MOSS and WSS MVPs

Chapter 2. Configuring Forms Based Authentication

by Stacy Draper

Forms Based Authentication (FBA) is a technique developers can use for authenticating users into Web applications. As a capability built into ASP.NET 2.0, FBA has become a very popular method for providing authentication functionality. FBA is the technology that challenges users to identify who they are. Once the credentials are obtained, the user identity is cached in a cookie. In its most basic form, an FBA challenge is a Web page that consists of a request of a username, password, and in what manner to persist the cookie. Because the SharePoint 2007 platform is built on top of ASP.NET 2.0, you essentially get FBA for free.

It's "essentially for free" only because there is no money changing hands, but what an investment in time it seems to have been in trying to figure out how to set it up. When you first take on configuring SharePoint for FBA, it seems that it's either the most counter-intuitive process, or it just simply doesn't work. After the community has invested several months collaborating, comparing notes, and working through it, we found out it does indeed work. It's simple, actually, once you know where everything is and how everything works and interacts with each other. This chapter covers the basic assets of FBA by utilizing the following:

• A user store — In this case, I will use a SQL database. If the application must be migrated to Active Directory (AD) later, using ADAM would be a better approach.