Custom webpart Personalization properties not saving in Sharepoint 2007

Question

I've inherited a VB.NET / MOSS 2007 Sharepoint application and have been tasked with adding a new custom Webpart.

I've declared a number of public properties to store configuration data for the webpart, like so:

Public Class CustomWebPart
    Inherits WebPart

    <Personalizable> _
    Public Property PrimaryID() As Int32

    Protected Overrides Sub CreateChildControls()
        MyBase.CreateChildControls()

        Controls.Add(New LiteralControl(PrimaryID.ToString())
    End Sub

End Class

This webpart has been added to a Sharepoint page in the standard way, within a WebPartManager etc..

I've created a custom EditorPart, with which I am able to correctly Sync and Apply changes to these configuration values. My custom EditorPart has the following ApplyChanges method:

Public Overrides Function ApplyChanges() As Boolean
    Dim part = DirectCast(Me.WebPartToEdit, CustomWebPart)
    part.PrimaryID = idSelector.SelectedValue

    part.SetPersonalizationDirty()
End Function

After editing and returning to the page, I see it showing the selected value for my property, and correctly rendering the report as specified in CreateChildControls() (simplified here). However, as soon as I refresh the page, my personalized properties return to their default values.

Here's what I've looked into so far:

• My account has administrative permissions
• Webpart is configured for Shared-level personalization (as it should be)
• Personalization (digging into WebPartManager.Personalization) IsEnabled, IsModifiable, but ProviderName = "" and HasPersonalizationState is uninitialized.
• Other custom webparts, with seemingly identical code, store personalized properties just fine.

Anyways - I'm at a loss. Thoughts? Happy to provide more code as required. Thanks!

Answer 1

Update Inadvertently figured this one out while working through an unrelated issue.

I had another property defined as

<Personalizable> Public Property IDs As IEnumerable(Of Int32)

later in the code. Can't serialize an interface though, especially one that represents an in-memory query - so it was killing Personalization altogether on my page. I replaced all my array-type properties with Lists, like so:

<Personalizable> Public Property IDs As List(Of Int32)

And now personalization is working. Hooray!