Creating a web part to manipulate List Data bypassing List and ListItem security

Question

I have a Tasks List and I need to create a Web Part to display one view of that list (with a functionality similar to a List View Web Part: item viewing, editing, sorting, filtering, etc).

However, some of the users that use this web part cannot have Write-Access to this list neither to any of its individual items. (This is mostly due to the fact that the tasks are generated by an external tool which I do not control). However, this users still must be able to see the tasks that are assigned to them, and they must be able to edit them, via my Web Part.

Is there any way for me to bypass the security settings of the list, in a Web Part, (perhaps through impersonation) in order to achieve this ?

Answer 1

Yes. It's called RunWithElevatedPrivileges. Code in the following delegate will run as the application pool account for your web application - so it should have full rights on the list you're dealing with.

string webUrl = ...
SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(
    delegate
    {
        using(SPSite secSite = new SPSite(webUrl)) {
            using(SPWeb secWeb = secSite.OpenWeb()){
                // Do Stuff
            }
        }
    });