If you are using password questions and answers as part of your self-service web site, you may use the Change Question And Answer panel to change a member's password question and password answer in case they forget it.
Note that the Password Question/Answer capabilities of the Asp.Net SQL Membership Provider are enabled and disabled through a setting in your application's web.config file. This setting, MembershipProvider.RequiresQuestionAndAnswer, is true by default and causes the Asp.Net PasswordRecovery Control to prompt the user for an answer to the password question before it resets or sends out the member's password.
As discussed in the article Asp.Net Membership Provider Password Administration, disabling the Membership Provider's RequiresQuestionAndAnswer property will actually allow you to use the Membership Manager control to administratively reset member passwords without having to know the answer to their password question.
If you choose to leave the MembershipProvider.RequiresQuestionAndAnswer setting set to true in web.config, then you will have to enable the MembershipProvider.EnablePasswordRetrieval property in order to utilize the Change Password or Reset Password features of the SqlMembershipProvider or the Membership Manager Control. (EnablePasswordRetrieval may not be turned on if you are using hashed passwords.)
Anticipating Exceptions
Since the Membership Manager Control depends on the configuration of your Membership Provider, certain exceptions may be anticipated if you have not properly configured the Asp.Net SqlMembershipProvider.
The following configuration topics explain the various messages you might receive while using the Change Question and Answer Panel:
You must specify a non-autogenerated machine key
Index was outside the bounds of the array
Provider not configured for Password Retrieval
Customizing the view (design time)
The Heading Text, New Question and New Answer prompts may be modified by changing
the ChangeQATitle, NewQuestionPrompt and NewAnswerPrompt
properties in the Visual Studio 2005 Properties pane.
While simple label and style changes might be adequate for your needs, you may also wish to take advantage of the Convert to Template option which exposes the view's constituent web controls for formatting and editing.
As illustrated, the Tasks panel includes an option to select the desired view then Convert to Template changes it to a templated panel.
Just like the Asp.Net Login Controls, templated views allow you to change the layout and content of the panel. You actually have a lot of flexibility when doing so, however you must not delete or change the name of the active controls such as the text box, the OK button or the Cancel Button.
The following is an example of a panel that has been converted to a template then customized with additional controls:
As you can see, the modified control may contain additional controls and varied formatting.
Control properties do not apply to templated views
When you convert a view to a templated view, the constituent controls are created using the current properties which have been set (styles, text, etc.) The next time you refresh the page, you may notice that properties related to the now-templated view are no longer listed in the Visual Studio 2005 Properties pane. This is by design and it is assumed that you will be setting properties on the controls themselves.
If you want to discard your templated changes, just bring up the tasks menu and click the Reset option as illustrated below. Caution: Reset will immediately discard any changes you have made to your custom view template. Of course, nothing is permanent until you save the file.
