Can we avoid clunky hiding of WebParts?

Question

It's a real drag and performance killer to have to load all the WebParts on a page and then laboriously hide and reveal all the ones relevant to user groups / permission levels. Especially when on the homepage (being the best place to show users their important stuff...) - it grinds the site/farm as well as causing major debug overhead. Surely there's a better way of targetting users with only their relevant webparts and not even having to load and hide irrelevant webparts?

So instead of using the old:

Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.SPLimitedWebPartManager mgr = null;
mgr = oWebUserTokened.GetLimitedWebPartManager(url, system.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.PersonalizationScope.Shared);
// first hide them all to avoid exposure…
foreach (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart thisWebPart1 in mgr.WebParts)
{
  thisWebPart1.Hidden = true;
  mgr.SaveChanges(thisWebPart1);
}
    // and then reveal the required ones….
    foreach (System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart thisWebPart2 in mgr.WebParts)
    {
      if (boolThisTypeOfUser) // needs particular webparts
      {
        if (thisWebPart2.Title == "Special Webpart Title")
        SetWebPartVisibility(mgr, thisWebPart2); // Show the WebPart etc
      }
      else // check for other user types…
    }

... and revealing the ones appropriate to the user, is there a way of bypassing to avoid loading irrelevant webparts at all?

I appreciate you may shout "use Audiences!!" but A) am on Foundation, and B) not sure if they load everything but then hide anyway, ie same overhead.

Seeing as we're in CreateChildControls() anyway, you'd have thought it was simple to merely avoid loading the irrelevant webparts, but either it's not, or I'm missing something obvious!

Answer 1

I would have your code that you have above within all the webparts!

if (boolThisTypeOfUser) // needs particular webparts
{
   //createchildcontrols as normal
}

can you see where im getting to? this way it knows to show the webpart by carrying on with the code within the createchildcontrols! otherwise dont do anything!

Your also getting rid of the looping each webpart within the webpart manager twice, once for hiding and the second for showing! this way there is no need to hide as nothing will be shown as no code will be run :)

also to minimise repeating code, you can create a seperate class project that does the working out for you as you have done and it returns a bool as you have shown above. Build the project and add it to each webpart projects references and call it whenever you want to check if the webpart needs to be loaded :)

clean, nice and fast ;)

Answer 2

No matter how you do it it's going to be a major headache when you're only limited to SharePoint Foundation. You don't have any advanced out of the box user/audience control with SharePoint Foundation.

1. When you insert webparts, to avoid heavy load on the page, set them to hidden right after you insert them on the page. That way they are already hidden and won't be loaded until told so by what code you fabric.
2. Use prefix in your webpart titles to easier tell your code which ones to display when.
3. You need to manually, either through code or external files, tell the current page which usergroups are allowed to see specific webparts.

What you practically have to do is re-invent what is already default in SharePoint Server.
I would recommend buying the SharePoint Server if it is within your price range.