Associating DNN Accounts With Windows Live

This article is a revisit to the Windows Live authentication functionality within DotNetNuke that I discussed earlier this week. After creating the inital linking to my site I found that I was able to setup the link properly and that users were able to go out to Windows Live, however, they were never able to successfully associate their Windows Live account to their DNN account on my website. After much research, and a helpful post from another DNN community member I have found out how to do it.

Setup Notes

For the most part the setup instructions that I provided in the previous article is correct, however, there is one important difference. The return URL that is specified on the Windows Live side of things MUST be a link to your Login page! If you have this setup correctly the users will then be able to associate their account.

Account Linking

If the Windows Live Integration has been configured properly it is VERY easy for your users to associate their account. After clicking login under the "Live Id" section of the login control they will be taken to Windows Live for login. Then if they have not logged into your site before with this ID they will be presented with the following screen.

As you can see here the users are given the option to either associate an existing account to their Windows Live account or they are able to register for a new account. This is the entire process, if the user enters a valid username/password combination for an existing account they will be logged into the site. The next time they login they will be directly logged into the site!

Posted by Mitchel on Friday, September 21, 2007

Tags: DotNetNuke, Tutorials

Comments

Hi Mitch,
Thanks for making this easy. One thing - you say you need to link to the Login page, but on PokerDIY this is a querystring (when I click on "Login"):
"http://www.pokerdiy.com/Home/tabid/354/ctl/Login/Default.aspx?returnurl=%2fDefault.aspx"

and the Live site does not allow that -

"This field cannot contain a query string. Please enter a URL with a domain name, path, and filename only."

How do you link directly to your login page? When I log in with LiveID it remains logged out...

Thanks
Rodney
Smart-Thinker.com

By Rodney Joyce on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 4:32 PM

Sorry, ignore that - when I saw the URL in the comment I realized the ReturnURL was not necc. ;)

By Rodney Joyce on Monday, October 22, 2007 at 4:37 PM

Looks like i have problems with third party providers, i have liveid and openid buttons as unclickable. Any ideas?

By Ismet Dumlupinar on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 3:20 AM

Ismet,

So you have configured them and the buttons appear but you simply cannot click on them?

My guess is a caching issue. Try restarting the application and seeing if that fixes things.

By mitchel.sellers@gmail.com on Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 7:15 AM

I'm using a false page as my default login page. I have students who click the default "login" link located in my skin, so I made a page w/ links to their appropriate logins (located at other sites) and dropped a linked period (.) down the page a ways that linked to our real DNN login page. Since my site settings have the false login page selected as the "login" it seems to be affecting my return url. I put the real login page as my return url, but after signing in w/ my LiveID it returns to the false login page. Any suggestions? (If you can make sense of what I wrote.)

By Brian Schmitt on Monday, November 19, 2007 at 1:30 PM

OK, I have it all set up, and when I type in my Username and Password to associate to my user account, I get an error message basically telling me wrong username or password. I know it is correct. I am having the same error on both of my DNN 4.7 websites. Anyone have anyidea here?

By Darnell Jordan on Saturday, November 24, 2007 at 8:15 AM

I am trying to check this Live ID authentication out on my localhost/DotNetNuke_2 installation, but can't get it to work. After loggingi in to Live ID I just get my login page back again.

Is there a trick with localhost? I have a DynDns account that successfully points back to my site.

By Neil Burnett on Saturday, April 12, 2008 at 12:50 PM

Neil,

Be sure that the URL you gave in the live id setup is the url to the login page (without querystring) and that it is the DynDns version.

It should then work.

By mitchel.sellers@gmail.com on Sunday, April 13, 2008 at 7:39 AM

Just a quick note that the portal must be set up to accept new user registrations or the blank login page is returned.