In my Last Post, I talked about creating a Form based authentication web application with Active Directory LDAP. After implementing that you have surely noticed that, when you try to sign in after creating a site collection from FBA web application, you get the following sign in page:

Surely, it does not look pretty at all. So, you might want to change this default login page. In order to do this, first let us create an empty SharePoint project in Visual Studio 2010. After that, add an application page by right click-selecting “Add New Item” and you will get like the following window in Solution Explorer:

Notice that, when you add any application page to your project, Visual Studio automatically creates a Layouts folder. To keep things simple enough for your understanding, you may keep your application page under a folder where you might name it as same as your project like the figure above.

Now, add a reference for Microsoft.SharePoint.IdentityModel in your project. Open the application page, and add an assembly for that on the top of your application page Beofre the Page tag, you should have the following section in your application page:

Now look ContentPlaceHolderID="PlaceHolderMain" and add a literal control and Login Control like the following:

Now, you can obviously customize according to your needs here. That’s it and our custom page is ready to use. So, save and deploy the project. After that, go to central administration->Application Management->Manage Web Application: select your web application for which you have enabled Form based authentication and click on Authentication Providers. Click on Default where a window will pop up and scroll down where you will see a section Sign In Page URL; select Custom Sign In Page and the path will be as the following format:

~/_layouts/ [Project name] / [Application Page Name].aspx

The following is the screenshot for my project:

Save it and go to your site collection/site login page which is using this FBA web app. When you will click on Sign In, you should get a page like the following one:

Custom Web Part  for signing in Form Based (Claims Based) Web applications:

You have seen until now that how can you create a custom login page for your FBA web application. Now, to improve the functionality like most of the public facing websites, you might want to put this login panel on the home page. Let us now discuss about creating a custom web part which will leverage us this option from home page where you can just add that webpart anywhere you like. So, let us get started.

Open Visual Studio 2010 and create an Empty SharePoint Project. To achieve our goal, we can add a normal web part or a visual web part to our project (Depending on the privilege of having the access to deploy the solution as Farm or Sandboxed). For this instance, I have chosen Farm based solution. So, I have added a Visual Web Part in my project (which is not possible in sandboxed solutions).  [In your case, if you do not have sufficient privilege, you can add a normal webpart and create the UI inside the CreateChildControls method of your webpart.]

Now, add the following references to your project:

Microsoft.IdentityModel

Microsoft.IdentityModel.WindowsToeknService

Microsoft.SharePoint.IdentityModel

For visual web part, add the Assembly name inside the .ascx page.

Now, add a login control to this ascx page like below and customize it according to your needs:

Notice that, I have added an event handler here FBALogin_Authenticate which will perform the authentication (see the code below)

Adding a Link for Windows Authentication on the Custom Login Web Part:

What if you want to add a link for windows authentication as well if your web application uses both form based and windows based authentication. For this, I have added a link for windows authentication on the web part.

Here below is the OnLoad event for the web part:

In this event, at first, I am checking the mode of the page whether it is new, edit or Logged in mode. We can get the URL for the validated URL from a query string called “ReturnUrl”.  Later on, I am setting the navigation URL link for the windows authentication and based on the page mode, hiding the login form which will hide the web part if the current page is in Edit, New or Logged In mode.

Above code will hide our web part based on the context mode of the page. I will also need to disable the login validator which is provided below:

Now, we are ready to go. Deploy it on your target site or site collection where you will use this web part. After adding the web part on the page, it will appear as following screenshot: