I need to do something fairly simple: in my ASP.NET MVC application, I want to set a custom IIdentity / IPrincipal. Whichever is easier / more suitable. I want to extend the default so that I can call something like `User.Identity.Id` and `User.Identity.Role`. Nothing fancy, just some extra properties.

I&#39;ve read tons of articles and questions but I feel like I&#39;m making it harder than it actually is. I thought it would be easy. If a user logs on, I want to set a custom IIdentity. So I thought, I will implement `Application_PostAuthenticateRequest` in my global.asax. However, that is called on every request, and I don&#39;t want to do a call to the database on every request which would request all the data from the database and put in a custom IPrincipal object. That also seems very unnecessary, slow, and in the wrong place (doing database calls there) but I could be wrong. Or where else would that data come from?

So I thought, whenever a user logs in, I can add some necessary variables in my session, which I add to the custom IIdentity in the `Application_PostAuthenticateRequest` event handler. However, my `Context.Session` is `null` there, so that is also not the way to go.

I&#39;ve been working on this for a day now and I feel I&#39;m missing something. This shouldn&#39;t be too hard to do, right? I&#39;m also a bit confused by all the (semi)related stuff that comes with this. `MembershipProvider`, `MembershipUser`, `RoleProvider`, `ProfileProvider`, `IPrincipal`, `IIdentity`, `FormsAuthentication`.... Am I the only one who finds all this very confusing?

If someone could tell me a simple, elegant, and efficient solution to store some extra data on a IIdentity without all the extra fuzz.. that would be great! I know there are similar questions on SO but if the answer I need is in there, I must&#39;ve overlooked.

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ASP.NET MVC - Set custom IIdentity or IPrincipal