How to add clickable and filterable user field for users not in site

Question

I have users in string like "Mikhail Pushin" and I want to add clickable links to users in a column of list item. Also I should be able to use filtering on this user column.

Unfortunately, I can't do it the obvious way using SPUser object, because I can't get it for some users which have no access to my site and hence are not visible in web.AllUsers, web.Users and web.SiteUsers.

What I tried

1. Add AD group which has all the users to site, but this doesn't help, because a user should be logged in at least once before to be visible in web.*Users.

2. Get ProfileBase object using

   UserProfileManager userProfileManager = new UserProfileManager(SPServiceContext.GetContext(SPContext.Current.Site));                       
   ProfileBase[] userProfiles = userProfileManager.Search("Mikhail Pushin");
   

   This way I can find a user, but it seems there is no way of converting ProfileBase object to SPUser.

3. Created a link to a user manually by using Note field and HTML's A tag. In the HREF attribute I set link obtained from ProfileBase. This way works well; however, in such a case I can't using OOB filtering on this column (which works for text and user columns if we click on the header).

Probably, some of you have ideas how I can achieve my goal. Every suggestion is very appreciated.

Answer 1

Once you have the ProfileBase object you can use the PublicUrl property to return the link to the user profile. You will have to handle the case where the user does not have a user profile.

Another approach is to use REST or CSOM against the UserProfile GetPropertiesFor endpoint. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163800.aspx