How to assign Profile values?

Question

I don\'t know what I am missing, but I added Profile properties in the Web.config file but cannot access Profile.Item in the code or create a new profile.

Answer 1

Web Application Projects can still use the ProfileCommon object but only at runtime. The code for it is just not generated in the project itself but the class is generated by ASP.Net and is present at runtime.

The simplest way to get to object is to use a dynamic type as demonstrated below.

In the Web.config file declare the profile properties:

Then to access the properties:

dynamic profile = ProfileBase.Create(Membership.GetUser().UserName);
string s = profile.GivenName;
profile.Surname = "Smith";

To save changes to profile properties:

profile.Save();

The above works fine if you are comfortable using dynamic types and don't mind the lack of compile-time checking and intellisense.

If you use this with ASP.Net MVC you have to do some additional work if you pass the dynamic profile object to your views since the HTML helper methods don't play well with "model" objects that are dynamic. You will have to assign profile properties to statically typed variables before passing them to HTML helper methods.

// model is of type dynamic and was passed in from the controller
@Html.TextBox("Surname", model.Surname) <-- this breaks

@{ string sn = model.Surname; }
@Html.TextBox("Surname", sn); <-- will work

If you create a custom profile class, as Joel described above, ASP.Net will still generate the ProfileCommon class but it will inherit from your custom profile class. If you don't specify a custom profile class ProfileCommon will inherit from System.Web.Profile.ProfileBase.

If you create your own profile class make sure that you don't specify profile properties in the Web.config file that you've already declared in your custom profile class. If you do ASP.Net will give a compiler error when it tries to generate the ProfileCommon class.