Can i use asp.net membership for building custom accounts?

Question

Hi I am new to ASP.net, i have seen the membership feature which looks quite interesting, but it has some fields for register and two fields for login as mostly required, my case is, i want to customize it, want to fetch user pass from custom table, want to fetch levels or designations from this login table, and want to store them in session etc, as this app is for an organization having hierarichal structure.

Please let me know, should i use membership

Answer 1

Yes you can absolutely use membership, and build upon the built in functionality.

Check aspnet_Profiles table. Custom fields can be placed within there. You want to look up details about asp.net membership profiles.

This is a good link regarding membership.

Also helpful: SQL Table Profile Provider

Answer 2

ASP.Net Role and Membership provider provides a framework for doing common Authentication and Authorization tasks. There are many standard implementations available such as SQLMembershipProvider. Any such implementation makes some assumption about the storage and retrieval of user data. For example SQL membership provider uses the SQL storage with specific tables to store user data.
You are free to write your own membership providers if the default implementation does not suffice your needs. One of the the advantage of using Membership provider over any other custom implementation is that ASP.Net provides a host of controls that can make using of such providers really easy and intuitive.