SharePoint User Specific Key Value settings

Question

I need to create functionality to save user specific data like bookmark, favorites etc. I want to know about the best approach I can take to save the user specific data so that logged in user can see their settings like we can use Property Bags to store site/web specific data.

Regards,

Ashish

Answer 1

If you want to make them reusable across the site collection for each user you can add Fields to the User Information List. You can add a feature receiver to your web parts solution that can create this column or check to see if this column exists in the User information list to be sure that the Column exists.

The User Information list is a Standard SharePoint list that SharePoint uses to store user information. To access the User Information List you can go to the Root web of the Site Collection and use the SiteUserInfoList property

E.G.

SPList userInformationlist = SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb.SiteUserInfoList;
//Or 
SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb;
SPList userInformationlist = web.SiteUserInfoList;

To access a users List Item you can use the Users Id to get the ListItem back from the User Information List

E.G.

SPListItem currentUserItem = userInformationlist.GetItemById(web.CurrentUser.ID);

If you are using MOSS you can store this information in the User Profiles and make it available across Site Collections this does not need My Sites to be enabled. You would need to use the User Profile classes to access this.

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