The Tridion Core Service is a powerful API that gives us access to everything in the Tridion system. Sometimes we want to use an account with Admin permissions to get lists of items or delete items, for example. However, when creating or publishing items, we often want to do this in the context of the user logged into our Web Application built with the Core Service. This article is going to explain how to use the logged in user to perform Core Service actions and also give you a small debugging tip for Visual Studio.

Creating the Core Service Connection

I use a SessionAwareCoreService client which allows me to impersonate the user only with the username and not requiring a password. However, we do need port 2660 open between my local Visual Studio instance and the server if I debug against the server. Otherwise, if I work on my own local Virtual Machine with Tridion installed, I do not need to worry about this limitation. Then, after deploying to the server, it will work as expected.

Code

Making it work in Visual Studio

This user is normally empty when debugging in Visual Studio and this caused a small issue for me. Luckily, I found this great StackOverflow post explaining the solution. The one that worked for me is this:

“look at the properties of the web project, hit F4 to get the project properties when you have the top level of the project selected. Do not right click on the project and select properties, this is something entirely different.

Change Anonymous Authentication to be Disabled and Windows Authentication to be Enabled.”

Happy Core Service hacking!