FBA and Profiles - My Site

sharepoint2010
codeplex
#1

Hi,

I've been using the FBA pack for while, and added some custom fields by basically following what the code does and extra variables here and there. It's all working, I can see the values from my registration form in my lists (eg. Job Title).

I'm at a stage where I'm developing members User Profiles, within SharePoints own MySite and really struggling with how to connect the 2 together.

Alot of searching has led to me trying for a long time to get the User Profile Service and User profile Synchronisation Service to start and then try to map the fields across. The SharePoint UserProfiles have their own Job Title field, so it would be ace to find a way to link these to be the same, but I've been banging my head against a brick wall for long enough now.

More recently, it's been suggested to write a custom ProfileProvider that uses the database for everything, is this the way to do it? It seems SharePoint has it's own version of the Profile classes, so it doesn't seem that obvious to me either!

Would appreciate any feedback on this, and if anyone has done it before themselves?

Thanks,

Bav

#2

I can't comment on the ProfileProvider, but I have tried to get the User Profile Synchronization working with FBA before, with no luck. As far as I can tell, it will only work against Active Directory. The custom user profile + sharing the profile across the farm is something that i'm planning on adding - but don't expect a release with it for at least month, if not longer.

#3

Strangely, it's quite nice to know other people struggle with the same thing.

That's brilliant that you're going to be adding custom profile features.

In the meantime, the route I'm going down, not entirely sure if it's the right way or if it's going to be successful is that (in my head) when the custom fields I've been adding to the membership review from the reg form get approved (or added directly in the admin section) the profile gets accessed and updated with these fields then and there, and then I can pretty much discard the ones stored in the list and only use the ones in the profile.

This way, the profile synch service doesn't even need to run, but I'm sure I'll come across further hiccups, and there'll be some fragmentation of sorts, but let's see what happens!

Cheers,
Bav

#4

If you're only dealing with one site collection that should work well. If you have multiple site collections, and want to share the profile across them, then maybe look into using a timer job.

#5

Ah right, good thinking, I hadn't even thought about that, I think I should be ok but I guess it wouldn't cause any harm to add a timer job at a later date (I think) if needs be.

#6
Chris,

Any luck with getting the User Profile Synchronization working with FBA? If so, do I need to upgrade to Sharepoint 2013 or will the User Profile Syncrhonization work with Sharepoint 2010?

thanks,

Martin
#7
Sorry, but I haven't had a chance to look at it. I have found that user profiles will synchronize against My Sites in SharePoint 2013. I haven't tried it with SharePoint 2010 though.