How to authenticate in an ASP.NET MVC application from a console application

asp.net-mvc-3, authentication, c#, networkcredentials, webclient

Solution

You're mixing credential types;

wc.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("user", "password");

is for HTTP authentication.

<authentication mode="Forms">
  <forms loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn" timeout="2880" />
</authentication>

is forms authentication.

These are entirely different, and not compatible. Using forms authentication from a command line app is challenging, you'd need to go to the login page with a request, POST the username and password, then take the authentication cookie that is return and attach it to subsequent requests.

Problem

I have a console application that sends a XML to a MVC application and receive another XML as a response. It works perfectly, but I want to add authorization (for obvious reasons). Here is the code from the console application: ``` using (var wc = new WebClient()) { return GetXmlFromBytes( wc.UploadData("URL", GetBytesFromXml(xmlToSend)) ); } ``` And here is the code from the MVC application: ``` public ActionResult DoSomething() { XElement xml = XElement.Load(new System.IO.StreamReader(Request.InputStream)); var response = InsertDataFromXml(xml); return File(GenerateFileFromResponse, "text/xml", "result.xml"); } ``` And it works. So, to implement the authorization, I added the following code: Console (added the `wc.Credentials`): ``` using (var wc = new WebClient()) { wc.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("user", "password"); return GetXmlFromBytes( wc.UploadData("URL", GetBytesFromXml(xmlToSend)) ); } ``` MVC application (added the `[Authorize]`): ``` [Authorize] public ActionResult DoSomething() { XElement xml = XElement.Load(new System.IO.StreamReader(Request.InputStream)); var response = InsertDataFromXml(xml); return File(GenerateFileFromResponse, "text/xml", "result.xml"); } ``` And it doesn't work. I don't know if this information is needed to solve this, but my `web.config` has the following item: ``` <authentication mode="Forms"> <forms loginUrl="~/Account/LogOn" timeout="2880" /> </authentication> ``` In fact, the file that the MVC application sends back is the HTML of the LogOn page! What do I have to do to solve this? Is any parameter missing in the `NetworkCredentials`? I know it can be instantiated with a `domain`, but I don't know what is the domain of the users in the MVC application. And, just to make sure: I assured "user" and "password" are valid.

Original source