About the book

This is the second chapter of the book ASP.NET MVC in Action. It has been published with the exclusive permission of Manning.

Written by: Jeffrey Palermo, Ben Scheirman, Jimmy Bogard, Eric Hexter, and Matthew Hinze
Pages: 432
Publisher: Manning
ISBN-10: 9781935182795

ASP.NET personalization requires database objects to be created. You can create these on your database by running a Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt and typing:

WPF provides strong support and powerful features for data access. WPF 4, together with the Visual Studio 2010 IDE, helps you develop data-bound applications efficiently.

This will install database support for profiles, roles, membership, and personalization on the server specified. To define the type of data you want to store for your users, you have to define it in the web.config. Listing 1 shows a sample configuration.

Listing 1: Setting up the personalization properties

We have identified two properties that we want to track for our users. In a Web Forms application, you would set these values to controls on your page form, directly accessing the Profile API from your code-behind. The only difference in ASP.NET MVC is that we need to do this in our controller. When adding items to ViewData, we can choose between explicitly adding each property into ViewData directly and passing the entire profile object. Your preference depends on how complex your profile properties are. Listing 2 shows a controller action that passes profile data to the view.

Listing 2: Passing the profile dictionary to the view

Listing 3: Displaying profile data on the view

The edit form is displayed in listing 4.

Listing 4: Displaying profile data on the view

Luckily, the Profile property is of type ProfileBase and is an abstract base class. This means we can easily test actions that utilize profile data. Setting the profile data is basically the opposite operation: you take form control values and put them on the profile dictionary.

Summary

In this article, we discussed setting up personalization, as well as displaying and editing profile data in ASP.NET MVC.

About Manning Publications

Manning Publication publishes computer books for professionals--programmers, system administrators, designers, architects, managers and others. Our focus is on computing titles at professional levels. We care about the quality of our books. We work with our authors to coax out of them the best writi... This author has published 33 articles on DotNetSlackers. View other articles or the complete profile here.