Teach User Manager how to search by email

A couple of days ago one interesting issue popped out in my Inbox. Our customer wanted to search users by email address in User Manager application. Quite legitimate request. Especially if you have an integration with AD or CRM or whatever external security system with large number of users. I tried a couple of configuration changes with no luck. Then checked our support portal knowledge base and saw several request like that. I was surprised by the fact that you cannot search users by email.

After spending several hours investigating how search functionality in User Manager works and doing some "shaman dancing" around it, I ended up with a solution that requires to override a standard Sitecore.Security.Accounts.UserProvider and change its method called "GetUsersByName". As it turned out, search functionality of User Manager calls the GetUserByName method when one searches for a user.

This is how it looks:

namespace Sitecore.SharedSource.Security.Accounts

{

public class UserProvider : Sitecore.Security.Accounts.UserProvider

{

protected override IEnumerable GetUsersByName(int pageIndex, int pageSize, string userNameToMatch)

{

return FindUsers(pageIndex, pageSize, userNameToMatch);

}

protected IEnumerable FindUsers(int pageIndex, int pageSize, string userNameToMatch)

{

Assert.ArgumentNotNull(userNameToMatch, "userNameToMatch");

IEnumerable users = null;

string userWithNoWildcard = StringUtil.RemovePostfix(Settings.Authentication.VirtualMembershipWildcard, StringUtil.RemovePrefix(Settings.Authentication.VirtualMembershipWildcard, userNameToMatch));

if (Regex.IsMatch(userWithNoWildcard, @"^([0-9a-zA-Z]([-.\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z])*@([0-9a-zA-Z][-\w]*[0-9a-zA-Z]\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,9})$"))

{

users = findByEmail(pageIndex, pageSize, userWithNoWildcard);

}

else

{

users = findUsername(pageIndex, pageSize, userNameToMatch);

}

return users;

}

protected IEnumerable findUsername(int pageIndex, int pageSize, string username)

{

int total;

return new Enumerable(delegate

{

return Membership.FindUsersByName(username, pageIndex, pageSize, out total).GetEnumerator();

},

delegate(object user)

{

return User.FromName(((MembershipUser)user).UserName, false);

});

}

protected IEnumerable findByEmail(int pageIndex, int pageSize, string userToMatch)

{

int total;

return new Enumerable(delegate

{

return Membership.FindUsersByEmail(userToMatch, pageIndex, pageSize, out total).GetEnumerator();

},

delegate(object user)

{

return User.FromName(((MembershipUser)user).UserName, false);

});

}

}

}

That's it! Simple enough, isn't it.

Thanks to Alex Shyba who helped me with some useful code!

After compiling the code and moving a dll to the /bin folder, don't forget to change a reference in web.config file to point it to a new UserProvider class.


    <userManager defaultProvider="default" enabled="true">
      <providers>
        <clear />
        <add name="default">
          <x:attribute name="type">Sitecore.SharedSource.Security.Accounts.UserProvider, YOUR_DLL_HERE</x:attribute>
        </add>
      </providers>
    </userManager>

For those who consider this so easy so that it's now worth to create a VS project I've built a ready-to-go Sitecore package with a dll and include file inside. Just install it and give it a try ;).

This is a Sitecore package.

Enjoy!