SPUser vs. UserProfile vs My Settings

Question

I've been working woth FBA now, and my site uses both windows login and FBA login. They both work fine, and I've setup a MySite successfully to view profiles, and setup content sites for either kind of account.

No when I setup my FBA, I added some custom fields, say Job title and Department name for example.

When I edit my mysite profile, these fields don't appear, but no problem, this is expected, as I haven't written any code to match these fields together.

Now, when I'm on my regular site and click 'My Settings' from the top right hand corner dropdown, I get to a screen that seems to aggregate some fields from my DB and My Site Profile. As well as a new mystery Department field, and I'm sure I've Job Title in there somewhere, these have been seen (I hope I haven't imagined it) before the FBA work was even introduced so must be somewhere in SharePoint.

The other weird thing is when I'm on the main bit of my site, My Settings has an edit button, when I'm on My Site, it doesn't.

I might also add that my 'My Site' is a site collection within the main site and so has the same base url.

If anyone can shed some light on how I can synchronise all this information and make a simple one stop source of info for a user, that would be grand!

Cheers, Bav

Answer 1

The story is longer, but here are the facts to the simplest:

1. SPUser could have multiple identities for each of the Identity Providers you have setup, in most cases is Windows-Classic and Claims. Claims mode, in turn, supports Windows, ASP.Net Forms Based Auth and SAML Token often referred to as Windows-Claims, FBA-Claims and SAML-Claims. In simple words - could be different users (the user names start with "i:0#.w" for Windows accounts)
2. Windows Accounts are usually the ones that get data synchronized from Active Directory (if User Profile is not configured, therefore NO My Sites - you are left with only the User Information List available per each Site Collection where minimal data is available,such as AD account, SID, Email, First name, last name. - this is what you see via My Settings always.
3. User profile is the one that shows Department, etc. all many others, i believe about 57 pre-mapped upon configuration by default. Others could be added from external systems -but these are NOT populated from AD in the case of FBA accounts that should be configured via a BCS connection and each of the properties usually coming from AD for all Windows accounts, must be manually mapped.