Issue with Order of Sitecore AD membership provider [Fixed!]

Recently we had an issue with our Sitecore AD membership provider. Details of the issue are as below.

• We are using same AD membership provider for our DEV/TEST/QA environment by using OU level as unit of separation
• Our business requirement was to use the same email id across multiple environments for testing. So, we updated the unique email setting to false requiresUniqueEmail="false" in the AD membership provider.
• We thought the issue is resolved and moved on. But the real problem came then when some developer created a Sitecore content editor user using the same email id.

In the code we were using the membership API as below

Membership.Provider.GetUserNameByEmail("emailid@yahoo.com")

Though this email id is registered in AD, we started getting the Sitecore user back. So, we found out that Sitecore membership provider is mapped to all domains.

<switchingproviders>
      <membership>
        <provider domains="*" providername="sql" storefullnames="true" wildcard="%" />
        <provider domains="ad" providername="ad" storefullnames="false" wildcard="*" />
      </membership>
</switchingproviders>

So we changed our configuration as below and everything is normal now.

<switchingProviders>
      <membership>
        <provider providerName="ad" storeFullNames="false" wildcard="*" domains="ad" />
        <provider providerName="sql" storeFullNames="true" wildcard="%" domains="*" />
      </membership>
</switchingProviders>

In my next post I will describe how we managed to use same AD roles across various environment (DEV/QA) users all registered in same AD under various OUs.