Profile Service

Often IdentityServer requires identity information about users when creating tokens or when handling requests to the userinfo or introspection endpoints. By default, IdentityServer only has the claims in the authentication cookie to draw upon for this identity data.

It is impractical to put all of the possible claims needed for users into the cookie, so IdentityServer defines an extensibility point for allowing claims to be dynamically loaded as needed for a user. This extensibility point is the IProfileService and it is common for a developer to implement this interface to access a custom database or API that contains the identity data for users.

IProfileService APIs

GetProfileDataAsync
The API that is expected to load claims for a user. It is passed an instance of ProfileDataRequestContext.
IsActiveAsync
The API that is expected to indicate if a user is currently allowed to obtain tokens. It is passed an instance of IsActiveContext.

ProfileDataRequestContext

Models the request for user claims and is the vehicle to return those claims. It contains these properties:

Subject
The ClaimsPrincipal modeling the user.
Client
The Client for which the claims are being requested.
RequestedClaimTypes
The collection of claim types being requested.
Caller
An identifier for the context in which the claims are being requested (e.g. an identity token, an access token, or the user info endpoint). The constant IdentityServerConstants.ProfileDataCallers contains the different constant values.
IssuedClaims
The list of Claim s that will be returned. This is expected to be populated by the custom IProfileService implementation.
AddRequestedClaims
Extension method on the ProfileDataRequestContext to populate the IssuedClaims, but first filters the claims based on RequestedClaimTypes.

Requested scopes and claims mapping

The scopes requested by the client control what user claims are returned in the tokens to the client. The GetProfileDataAsync method is responsible for dynamically obtaining those claims based on the RequestedClaimTypes collection on the ProfileDataRequestContext.

The RequestedClaimTypes collection is populated based on the user claims defined on the resources that model the scopes. If the scopes requested are an identity resources, then the claims in the RequestedClaimTypes will be populated based on the user claim types defined in the IdentityResource. If the scopes requested are an API resources, then the claims in the RequestedClaimTypes will be populated based on the user claim types defined in the ApiResource and/or the Scope.

IsActiveContext

Models the request to determine is the user is currently allowed to obtain tokens. It contains these properties:

Subject
The ClaimsPrincipal modeling the user.
Client
The Client for which the claims are being requested.
Caller
An identifier for the context in which the claims are being requested (e.g. an identity token, an access token, or the user info endpoint). The constant IdentityServerConstants.ProfileDataCallers contains the different constant values.
IsActive
The flag indicating if the user is allowed to obtain tokens. This is expected to be assigned by the custom IProfileService implementation.