Get display name (External Name) for user profile properties

Question

I'm having a hard time to accomplish the below.

I have small app empowering the users to query user profile properties (SharePoint Online). I'm using CSOM which is quite straight forward.

I can pull the user's profile properties. But CSOM only returns the properties Key/Value pairs. The key is the Internal Name and not the Display name (External User) that user usually see from the UI.

The users of this app can query the profile property by the External name, i.e. they can key in "First Name" instead of "FirstName" or "Job Title" instead of "SPS-JobTitle".

As workaround, I have made soap request to /_vti_bin/UserProfileService.asmx which it returns all the user properties (Display Name, Internal Name) and from there I have some line of codes to match Internal name with its display name.

Unfortunately, I'm using OAuth2.0 authentication (Azure AD app) which /_vti_bin/UserProfileService.asmx does not support but CSOM supports.

Please guide me how can I user's profile property External names (Display name) with its value?

I hope my question clear enough.

Answer 1

You can use Rest API to query for the users' display name.

$.ajax({
  url: "http://<site url/_api/sp.userprofiles.profileloader.getprofileloader
    /getuserprofile",
  type: "POST",
  headers: {
    "X-RequestDigest": <form digest value>,
    "accept": "application/json;odata=verbose"
  },
  success: successHandler,
  error: errorHandler
});

Here Account Name and Display Name should server your purpose. The above is a javascript code, which you can easily embed. However, if you want, you can also look into how to use share point rest in C# managed code

Please refer to Restful Endpoints for Userprofile services

Answer 2

In case anyone comes cross this. The workaround that i followed to accomplish that is retrieving all the fields of sharepoint online list named "User Information List": https:///_api/Lists/getbytitle('User Information List')/fields