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Role-Based Menu in ASP.NET MVC


Role-Based Menu in ASP.NET MVC with Example


In this article, we are going to learn how to create a role-based menu in ASP.NET MVC. This menu system will show menu items based on the role of the login user. For instance, Admin user will be able to create more role, assign a user to a role and activities that only admin of the site can perform.

This will enable the system to control who see what of the system. We are using our application from the previous article Role-BasedAuthorization in ASP.NET MVC
Open the project Csharpnaija_Security in Visual Studio to continue from role-based authorization. Since we have learnt how to provide role-based authorization to our user, role-based menu will be just a question of changing or adding some razor code to our layout view (Page).

Expand the Views folder of our project in solution explorer, then expand the Shared folder to see the layout view as shown below


Now double click on the Layout.cshtml to see the html and razor of our layout which is the same as the master page is ASP.NET Webforms, the code snippet is as shown below

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>@ViewBag.Title - My ASP.NET Application</title>
    @Styles.Render("~/Content/css")
    @Scripts.Render("~/bundles/modernizr")

</head>
<body>
    <div class="navbar navbar-inverse navbar-fixed-top">
        <div class="container">
            <div class="navbar-header">
                <button type="button" class="navbar-toggle" data-toggle="collapse" data-target=".navbar-collapse">
                    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                    <span class="icon-bar"></span>
                </button>
                @Html.ActionLink("Csharpnaija Security", "Index", "Home", new { area = "" }, new { @class = "navbar-brand" })
            </div>
            <div class="navbar-collapse collapse">
                <ul class="nav navbar-nav">
                    <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li>
                    <li>@Html.ActionLink("Employee", "Index", "Employees")</li>
                    <li>@Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")</li>
                    <li>@Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Home")</li>
                </ul>
                @Html.Partial("_LoginPartial")
            </div>
        </div>
    </div>
    <div class="container body-content">
        @RenderBody()
        <hr />
        <footer>
            <p>&copy; @DateTime.Now.Year - My ASP.NET Application</p>
        </footer>
    </div>

    @Scripts.Render("~/bundles/jquery")
    @Scripts.Render("~/bundles/bootstrap")
    @RenderSection("scripts", required: false)
</body>
</html>

From the code above, locate where the menu list items start, that is where the links of the menu are generated as shown below

<div class="navbar-collapse collapse">
                <ul class="nav navbar-nav">
                    <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li>
                    <li>@Html.ActionLink("Employee", "Index", "Employees")</li>
                    <li>@Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")</li>
                    <li>@Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Home")</li>
                </ul>
                @Html.Partial("_LoginPartial")
            </div>

We can now check to see if a user is permitted to use the system, that means is he authenticated? The code for the checking is as shown below

Razor Code

@if(User.Identity.IsAuthenticated), this code will determine if a user as signed in or not. If the user is signed in, then check if he is in the specified role(s) to see the menu links
@User.IsInRole(“RoleName”) the code snippet is as shown below

@if (User.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
            {
                if (User.IsInRole("Admin"))
                {
                    <div class="navbar-collapse collapse">
                        <ul class="nav navbar-nav">
                            <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li>
                            <li>@Html.ActionLink("Admin", "Index", "Admin")</li>
                            <li>@Html.ActionLink("Employee", "Index", "Employees")</li>
                            <li>@Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")</li>
                            <li>@Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Home")</li>
                        </ul>
                        @Html.Partial("_LoginPartial")
                    </div>

                }
           else{
                <div class="navbar-collapse collapse">
                    <ul class="nav navbar-nav">
                        <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li>
                        <li>@Html.ActionLink("Employee", "Index", "Employees")</li>
                        <li>@Html.ActionLink("About", "About", "Home")</li>
                        <li>@Html.ActionLink("Contact", "Contact", "Home")</li>
                    </ul>
                @Html.Partial("_LoginPartial")
                </div>
           }
}

If you launch the application without login, you will only see the menu meant for anonymous users as shown below based on our Cshapnaija_Security application.


If you login with an Admin role, you will see the menu link for Admin from an Admin Controller as shown below


Hope you find this article useful.

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Location: Abuja, Nigeria

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