What is the best way to store and retrieve custom user settings?

Question

Our intranet site has 5,000 users. It is running on SharePoint 2013 on-premise, and has a top navigation menu item named "Applications." When user hovers over "Applications", a list of applications will be displayed on a drop down overlay in the form of tiles. The user can then drag-and-drop the tiles to rearrange the order of the application tiles if desired. When the user does that, the new tiles order needs to be saved as a serialized string via JSON for future use. We have a security policy not to use cookies.

What would be the most efficient way for storing custom user settings like this in SharePoint 2013? Save to a list? Save to an external database table via BCS? Custom property in User Profile?

Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

You can create a custom user property which can be easily used in your JSOM code. link

You can also save to a list or any other database , you would require extra development effort for that. You need to first query list or Database to get the property.

So in your case custom property would be the best option. link

Answer 2

Approach 1: You need to write custom JSOM script to create a UserPreference values as an object and store in a list. The script requires to be loaded with masterpage, so that the user Preference values are feteched before the page is rendered.

Approach 2: You have Rootweb.AllProperties.Add method. You can store user preferences using this method. You can read values from these properties whenever you needed.

Thanks.