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Overriding Controller Authorization in ASP.NET MVC

You have a Contoller class called Adminstration that only admins should use. There's about a dozen Action methods in the Controller class and they all should only be accessed by users in the Admin or SuperAdmin roles. Rather than put an Authorize attribute on each method, you can put just one on the Controller class, like this:

<Authorize(Roles:="Admin,SuperAdmin")>
Public Class AdministrationController

Did I say that all of your methods in this controller should be accessed only by the Admin and SuperAdmin users? I lied. There's one really annoying method that doesn't require this level of authorization (it just displays a list of administrators with their contact information). You could try moving it to another Controller or you could put Authorize attributes on all the methods ... or you could use OverrideAuthentication.

The OverrideAuthentication attribute lets you discard the authorization set at the Controller level. You can then follow the OverrideAuthentication attribute with whatever Authorize attribute your method actually needs.

Here's an example that lets anyone in the User role use the ListAdmins method:

<OverrideAuthentication>
<Authorize(Roles:="User")>
Public Function ListAdmins() As ActionResult

There are four other Override* attributes including one called OverrideException that lets you discard HandleError attributes set at the Controller or Global Filters level.

Posted by Peter Vogel on 07/18/2018


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