Displaying Additional User Information in a Sitefinity Forum Post

In this blog post I will show you how you could display additional user information in a Sitefinity forum post. This user information should be available as a custom field in the users’ profile.

Prerequisites:

Created custom field in the users’ profile (for example: JobPosition)

Code explanation:

1.  We need to create a class for our custom field and inherit from Literal:

2.  Define the necessary variables and properties for post owner and custom field value.

           private string ownerId = null;

        private string myField = null;

 

        public string OwnerId

        {

            get{ return ownerId;}

            set{ ownerId = value;}

        }

 

        public string MyField

        {

            get{ return myField;}

            set{ myField = value;}

        }

3.  Extend the CreateChildControl method of Literal to get the post owner and the field value by overriding the standard ones:

protected override void CreateChildControls()

  {

      // get the current identity

      var identity = ClaimsManager.GetCurrentIdentity();

 

      // get information about the user from the properties of the ClaimsIdentityProxy object

      var userId = identity.UserId;

 

    // Get user and profile Manager

      UserProfileManager profileManager = UserProfileManager.GetManager();

      UserManager userManager = UserManager.GetManager();

 

    // Get current user

      User user = userManager.GetUser(userId);

 

    // Get the current user’s profile

      SitefinityProfile profile = null;

 

      if (user != null)

      {

          profile = profileManager.GetUserProfile<SitefinityProfile>(user);

      }

 

    // Get the value we are interested to

      var mySearchedField = profile.GetValue(myField).ToString();

 

    // This text will be displayed when we call the property.

      Text = mySearchedField;

 

    // Call the base method

      base.CreateChildControls();

  }

4. Add the create .cs file in the root project directory (in case of a custom folder, you need to update the respective references)

5. Build the project

6.  Create a copy of your post widget

7. Register the new control by adding this code at the Register section of the post widget (or create a new post widget based on the built-in one, in order to have both versions):

<%@ Register TagPrefix=" myTagPrefix " Namespace="SitefinityWebApp" Assembly="SitefinityWebApp" %>

8. Add the following markup where you need your custom field:

<myTagPrefix:CustomField Text='<%# Eval("Content") %>' OwnerId='<%# Eval("Owner")%>' MyField='JobPosition' runat="server" />

This example works for a different number of fields in the profile, just replace the 'JobPosition' with the desired one.

You could download the complete code example of CustomField.