How to add claims in ASP.NET Identity

Question

I am trying to find a document or example of how you would add custom claims to the user identity in MVC 5 using ASP.NET Identity. The example should show where to insert the claims in the OWIN security pipeline and how to persist them in a cookie using forms authentication.

Answer 1

The correct place to add claims, assuming you are using the ASP.NET MVC 5 project template is in ApplicationUser.cs. Just search for Add custom user claims here. This will lead you to the GenerateUserIdentityAsync method. This is the method that is called when the ASP.NET Identity system has retrieved an ApplicationUser object and needs to turn that into a ClaimsIdentity. You will see this line of code:

// Note the authenticationType must match the one defined in CookieAuthenticationOptions.AuthenticationType
var userIdentity = await manager.CreateIdentityAsync(this, DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ApplicationCookie);

After that is the comment:

// Add custom user claims here

And finally, it returns the identity:

return userIdentity;

So if you wanted to add a custom claim, your GenerateUserIdentityAsync might look something like:

// Note the authenticationType must match the one defined in CookieAuthenticationOptions.AuthenticationType
var userIdentity = await manager.CreateIdentityAsync(this, DefaultAuthenticationTypes.ApplicationCookie);

// Add custom user claims here
userIdentity.AddClaim(new Claim("myCustomClaim", "value of claim"));

return userIdentity;