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;

When you create a new Web site project in Visual Studio then the object that is returned from Profile will be (automatically) generated for you. When you create a Web application project or an MVC project, you will have to roll your own.

This probably sounds more difficult than it is. You need to do the following:

• Create a database using aspnet_regsql.exe This tool is installed along with the .NET framework.
• Write a class that derives from ProfileGroupBase or install the Web Profile Builder (WPB) that can generate the class for you from the definition in Web.Config. I have been using WPB for a while and up until now it has done what is expected of it. If you have a lot of properties, using WPB can save quite a bit of time.
• Make sure the connection to the database is properly configured in Web.Config.
• Now you are set to create an instance of your profile class (in the controller)
• You will probably need the profile property values in your views. I like to pass the profile object itself along to the view (not individual properties).

If you are using a web application project, you cannot access the Profile object at design-time out-of-the-box. Here is a utility that supposedly does it for you: http://weblogs.asp.net/joewrobel/archive/2008/02/03/web-profile-builder-for-web-application-projects.aspx. Personally, that utility caused an error in my project so I ended up rolling my own profile class to inherit from ProfileBase. It was not hard to do at all.

MSDN walkthrough for creating a custom class (a.k.a. Joel's method):
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc163624.aspx

Great post,

Just a note on the web.config if you dont specify the inherit attribute in the profile element you will need to specify each indiviudal profile property inside the profile element on the web.config as below

 <properties>
    <clear/>
    <add name="property-name-1" />
    <add name="property-name-2" />
    ..........

 </properties>