How can I customise the image displayed in the claim picker?

Question

I have got several custom claim providers which provide search and resolve functionality to the orgin sources of various incoming claims to our SharePoint 2010 farm.

I was wondering if anyone knew how to display a different image (to the default 'polaroid' of a user) in the claim picker in 'detailed view.' I would ideally like to show an icon which pertians to the source of that claim data, rather than an icon which suggests user data.

It does strike me that the schema for the claim picker is still focussed around users and does not lend itself to a truly federated access management scenario where your key claim may not be user centric.

Help is appreciated as always.

Answer 1

It took me some time and I lost some hair in process, but I managed to solve this one. And it's so simple that it hurts.

When developing custom claim provider you are overriding method FillSearch. Here you are filling search results with your custom entities. When creating new custom entity just add new key to your EntityData hashtable and call it .... Picture. In the value part store path to the picture and you are done.

Example:

PickerEntity entity = CreatePickerEntity();
// Bulid your entity
entity.EntityData["Picture"] = "/_layouts/images/mybeautifulclaimpic.png";
// Add picker to results tree
searchTree.AddEntity(entity);

In general you can define different picture for each entity or use one picture for each custom claim provider or you can do whatever you like.