Content Type, document template and forms authentication

Question

I have a custom content type defined, with a document template, similar to below:

<ContentType 
    ID="0x010100120A74C7DFDA4C6fA8C3E519B41F421E" 
    Name="My Excel Library" 
    Group="My Content Types"
    Description="">
    <FieldRefs>
        <FieldRef ID="{xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx}" Name="Description" Required="FALSE" />
     </FieldRefs>
    <DocumentTemplate TargetName="MyTemplate.XLSX" />
</ContentType>
<Module Name="My Template" SetupPath="Features\MyContentTypes" Url="_cts/My Template">
    <File Url="MyTemplate.XLSX"/>
</Module>

Now if I provision a library with this content type added to it, and click 'New' on the list view menu, I see my content type. If I then click on my content type, my document template gets opened successfully, but ONLY when using Windows authentication.

With forms based authentication, I get the standard IE login prompt (domain\username and password). Since I'm a forms user, my credentials won't work here. If I click 'Cancel', it still opens Excel (since my document template is an .xlsx file), but instead of my document template, Excel tries to render my custom login.aspx page for forms authentication (not very pretty).

Any thoughts? Can I not use a custom document template with forms authentication?

Answer 1

I think I've figured this out on my own. Please feel free to chime in if you have any concerns or comments about this approach. First of all, the following article was instrumental in find the solution: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb977430.aspx#MOSSFBAPart3_IntegratingWithOffice2007.

I found that if I click on the "Remember me next time" check box on my forms login page, to force my membership provider to issue a persistent authentication cookie, then the document template opens with no problem (even without enabling anonymous access for the zone). There are some caveats to using persisted cookies (as detailed in the article), but this seems like the best approach to me at the moment.

Hopefully, somebody else will find this thread to be helpful in the future.