Authentication from a .Net client

How to authenticate with a sensenet repository from a .Net client

Unless you are working with publicly available content - like blog posts - it is necessary to make authenticated calls to the sensenet repository to access content items. In this article you'll see how to achieve that in a .Net application.

To learn more about the sensenet authentication flow and components, please visit this article.
If you do not have a repository yet, please head over to www.sensenet.com to get one.
This workflow requires the client application to have a sensenet repository url, a client id and also a client secret. To acquire these values, please visit your profile page and select the repository you want to connect to.

Create a new console application

Create a new .Net Core console application either in command line (dotnet new), Visual Studio or VS Code.

Install the following NuGet packages:

SenseNet.Client
Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection
Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Console

Add the following namespace registrations to the beginning of your Program.cs file:

using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection;
using Microsoft.Extensions.Logging;
using SenseNet.Client;
using SenseNet.Client.Authentication;
using SenseNet.Extensions.DependencyInjection;

Register and load a token store service

In an Asp.Net Core web application registering services is more straightforward, but in a console application you'll have to do some manual work to achieve the same result:

// assemble a service container and register the sensenet token store
var provider = new ServiceCollection()
    .AddSenseNetClientTokenStore()
    .AddLogging(logging => logging.AddConsole())
    .BuildServiceProvider();
// load the token store service
var tokenStore = provider.GetService<TokenStore>();

Set up the connection to the sensenet service

Create a server object and provide your sensenet service url, client id and secret. The token is requested from our auth server (which uses IdentityServer 4 to manage tokens) and cached in the background. Our client library will add this auth token to every request you send to the sensenet repository service.

// define sensenet service url
var server = new ServerContext
{
    Url = "https://example.sensenet.cloud"
};
// request and set the access token
server.Authentication.AccessToken = await tokenStore.GetTokenAsync(server, "clientid", "secret");
ClientContext.Current.AddServer(server);

From now on you'll be able to send authenticated requests to the server. The permission level of the request is determined by the client id you provide here: it represents a user in the content repository.

To learn more about the client API we offer for .Net developers and example requests you can make from a .Net Core client application, please visit the following articles: