How to check if current user is permitted to create personal site and create it on demand

Question

Given the following situation:

Within our company's farm the creation of MySites / PersonalSites is limited to members of a special AD Group ("MysiteCreator").

This group has been given the following permissions within the User Profile Service:

All the other, "casual" users are not permitted to create a MySite / Personal Site.

Now I'm wondering how to check by code if the current user is permitted to create a personal site and then create it on demand.

I've read some posts about checking the UserProfile.PersonalSiteCapabilities == "14" (see here and here). So I wrote this piece of code:

internal bool EnsurePersonalSite()
{
  UserProfileManager upm = new UserProfileManager(SPServiceContext.Current);
  UserProfile up = upm.GetUserProfile(true);

  // User not permitted (?) to create personal site
  if ((up.PersonalSiteCapabilities & PersonalSiteCapabilities.Social)
    != PersonalSiteCapabilities.Social)
  {
    return false;
  }

  // User permitted ==> create personal site
  up.CreatePersonalSiteEnque(true);
  return false;

  // Creation ongoing
  if (up.PersonalSiteInstantiationState != PersonalSiteInstantiationState.Created
    || up.PersonalSite == null)
  {
    return false;
  }

  return true;
}

The casual user has a PersonalSiteCapabilities == 0 entry in his user profile (shown in Central Administration). Adding the user to the "MysiteCreator" AD group does not change this value to 14 and my code will always return false.

If I would set PersonalSiteCapabilities = 14 for all users my code will always return true no matter if the user is member of the AD Group "MysiteCreator" or not.

So what's the best, safest way to ensure a MySite / Personal Site for users only belonging to a special AD group?

Answer 1

I'm not sure the value will be 14 unless the person has actually created a mysite.

Here is how SharePoint is doing it but it involves some internal methods:

SPServiceContext context = SPServiceContext.GetContext(SiteInfo.CurrentWeb().Site);
UserProfileApplicationProxy proxy = UserProfileApplicationProxy.GetProxy(context);
if (proxy.CheckUserAccess(context, UserProfileApplicationUserRights.CreatePersonalSite))
{

}

You can use reflection to call the GetProxy and CheckUserAccess methods.

Answer 2

With Steve Lineberry's answer pointing to reflection I've found an internal property CanCreatePresonalSite of the Microsoft.Office.Server.UserProfiles.UserProfile class which I'm now using this way:

internal static bool CheckPersonalSiteCreation(UserProfile up)
{
  Type type = up.GetType();

  PropertyInfo pi = type.GetProperty(
    "CanCreatePersonalSite",
    BindingFlags.NonPublic | BindingFlags.Instance | BindingFlags.Static);

  object value = pi.GetValue(up);

  return (bool)value;
}