How to assign Profile values?

I had the same problem today, and learned a lot.

There are two kinds of project in Visual Studio — “Web Site Projects” and “Web Application Projects.” For reasons which are a complete mystery to me, Web Application Projects cannot use Profile. directly… the strongly-typed class is not magically generated for you from the Web.config file, so you have to roll your own.

The sample code in MSDN assumes you are using a Web Site Project, and they tell you just to add a <profile> section to your Web.config and party on with Profile.property, but that doesn’t work in Web Application Projects.

You have two choices to roll your own:

(1) Use the Web Profile Builder. This is a custom tool you add to Visual Studio which automatically generates the Profile object you need from your definition in Web.config.

I chose not to do this, because I didn’t want my code to depend on this extra tool to compile, which could have caused problems for someone else down the line when they tried to build my code without realizing that they needed this tool.

(2) Make your own class that derives from ProfileBase to represent your custom profile. This is easier than it seems. Here’s a very very simple example that adds a “FullName” string profile field:

In your web.config:

<profile defaultProvider="SqlProvider" inherits="YourNamespace.AccountProfile">

<providers>
     <clear />
     <add name="SqlProvider"
          type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider"
          connectionStringName="sqlServerMembership" />
</providers>

</profile>

In a file called AccountProfile.cs:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Profile;
using System.Web.Security;

namespace YourNamespace
{
    public class AccountProfile : ProfileBase
    {
        static public AccountProfile CurrentUser
        {
            get { return (AccountProfile)
                         (ProfileBase.Create(Membership.GetUser().UserName)); }
        }

        public string FullName
        {
            get { return ((string)(base["FullName"])); }
            set { base["FullName"] = value; Save(); }
        }

        // add additional properties here
    }
}

To set a profile value:

AccountProfile.CurrentUser.FullName = "Snoopy";

To get a profile value

string x = AccountProfile.CurrentUser.FullName;