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• Jay

  Posted on May 19, 2008 (permalink)

  Hi,
  
  We are looking at implementing sitefinity on our Intranet and would like to enable the user to be able to set some preferences e.g. add personal links, save searches.
  
  Does sitefinity support this out of the box or do we have to implement our on solution?
  
  Regards,
  
  Jay
  

  Reply

• Nikifor Nikifor

  Posted on May 20, 2008 (permalink)

  Hello Jay,
  
  As far as we understand your requirements Sitefinity will suit in an Intranet environment such as yours. We have a Preferences section where you can set custom settings separately for each user. Anyway, it would be really helpful if you could elaborate on what exactly you mean by "personal links and save searches". Sitefinity has its own page editor so it is possible to set a personal page for every user, if that is what you mean.
  
  Maybe you will find useful information in our Blogs. Please check the following two links where my colleague Ivan has given examples for using Sitefinity as a Social Network Platform: Sitefinity Social Network Platform (part 1): Rudimentary specs and ideas and Sitefinity Social Network Platform (part 2): setting up public side membership
  
  Hope that this information is helpful.
  
  Regards,
  

  Nikifor

  the Telerik team

  
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  Reply

• Jay

  Posted on May 20, 2008 (permalink)

  Hi Nikifor,
  
  Thanks for the reply, we want users to be able to personalize the Intranet homepage by being able to save personal links we need to be able to cater for anonymous users as well.
  
  I have enabled anonymous in the web.config:
  
     <anonymousIdentification enabled="true"/>
      <profile defaultProvider="Sitefinity">
        <providers>
          <clear />
          <add  name="Sitefinity" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" type="Telerik.DataAccess.AspnetProviders.TelerikProfileProvider, Telerik.DataAccess" />
        </providers>
        <properties >
          <add name="FirstName" />
          <add name="LastName"  />
          <add name="MyLinkTest" allowAnonymous="true"  />
        </properties>
      </profile>
  
  On my test page I have:
  
      protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
      {
          if (!IsPostBack)
          {
  
              TextBox1.Text = Profile.Link;
          }
      }
  
      protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
      {
          Profile.Link = TextBox1.Text;
      }
  
  This works if I remove sitefinity as the default provider, I have tried implementing a few different things after reading the developers manual with limited success, if you could point me in the right direction that would be appreciated.
  
  Regards,
  
  Jay
  
  

  Reply

• Jay

  Posted on May 20, 2008 (permalink)

  Forgive the typo TextBox1.Text = Profile.Link should read TextBox1.Text = Profile.MyLinkTest same with Profile.Link = TextBox1.Text should read Profile.MyLinkTest
  
  Regards,
  
  Jay

  Reply

• Nikifor Nikifor

  Posted on May 22, 2008 (permalink)

  Hello Jay,
  
  

  Thanks for the update.

  The Sitefinity profile provider offers the ability to save all kinds of data for registered, as well as anonymous users. This means that different kinds of data, like strings, numeric types, collections, etc. can be stored using the default profile. If you need to add just a few customizations to the user's home page, it is enough to create a few user controls which utilize the profile information (like the example you gave).

  However, if you plan to handle many users and add many profile properties, you might want to use your own Profile Provider as the one Sitefinity uses, as well as the default SqlProfileProvider are too generic and not well optimized.

  Regarding your last question, could you please give us more details for the exact problem with the default provider? It would be really helpful if you could provide some specific examples.

  For more information, you could check this blog post: http://blogs.sitefinity.com/Ivan/Post/08-01-17/sitefinity_social_network_platform_part_2_setting_up_public_side_membership.aspx

  Greetings,
  

  Nikifor

  the Telerik team

  
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• farhan

  Posted on Jun 9, 2008 (permalink)

  Hi,
  
  I have the same issue regarding Anonymous profiles.
  
  I have enabled Anonymous profiles by editing the web.config as follows:
  
  

  <anonymousIdentification cookieless="AutoDetect" enabled="true"/>
          <profile enabled="true" defaultProvider="Sitefinity">
              <providers>
                  <clear/>
                  <add name="Sitefinity" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" type="Telerik.DataAccess.AspnetProviders.TelerikProfileProvider, Telerik.DataAccess"/>
              </providers>
              <properties>
                  <add name="ShoppingCart" serializeAs="Binary" type="espa.core.business.ESPAShoppingCart" allowAnonymous="true"/>
              </properties>

  However, when I set the items in my ShopingCart, the data does not persist between pages.  I know my code is working because if I use ASP.NET default provider it works.  However, if I use the Sitefinity provider it does not work. 
  

  Does the Sitefinity provider support Anonymous Profiles?  If so, can you please let me know what I need to do to enable this feature.

  
  

  
  

  Regards,
  Farhan
  

  
  

  Reply

• Nikifor Nikifor

  Posted on Jun 13, 2008 (permalink)

  Hi farhan,
  
  There shouldn't be any problem with using Anonymous Providers in Sitefinity projects. Anyway, we would need some time to investigate the particular problem you are faced with so we suggest you using the SQL Membership Provider instead of the default Sitefinity one.
  
  Regards,
  

  Nikifor

  the Telerik team

  
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  Reply

• Adam

  Posted on Jun 30, 2008 (permalink)

  Has this issue been resolved?  We are having the same problems with anonymous profiles.  They are not being persisted with the sitefinity profile provider.  The exact same code works with the sqlprofileprovider, but we would prefer to keep all membership information together instead of registering another copy of the asp.net membership tables in our database.  Our webconfig is included below:
  
  

  <anonymousIdentification enabled="true"/>

  <profile defaultProvider="Sitefinity">

  <providers>

  <clear/>

  <add name="Sitefinity" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" type="Telerik.DataAccess.AspnetProviders.TelerikProfileProvider, Telerik.DataAccess"/>

  </providers>

  <properties>

  <add name="MarketState" type="String" allowAnonymous="true"/>

  <add name="MarketCity" type="String" allowAnonymous="true"/>

  </properties>

  </profile>

  
  Thanks,
  Adam
  

  Reply

• farhan

  Posted on Jul 1, 2008 (permalink)

  The way I solved it was buy making the profile properties use multiple profile providers.  For the anonymous properites, I use the default ASP.NET provider, which means I need to ensure my Database Server has the ASP.NET tables.  Here is my web config:
  
  

  <anonymousIdentification cookieless="AutoDetect" enabled="true"/>

  <profile enabled="true" defaultProvider="Sitefinity">

  <providers>

  <clear/>

  <add name="Sitefinity" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" type="Telerik.DataAccess.AspnetProviders.TelerikProfileProvider, Telerik.DataAccess"/>

  <add name="AspNetProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider" connectionStringName="AspNetServices" applicationName="ESPAOnline" description="ASPProfileProvider for Anonymous ESPAOnline"/>

  </providers>

  <properties>

  <add name="FirstName" type="string"/>

  <add name="LastName" type="string"/>

  <add name="CurrencyCode" provider="AspNetProvider" defaultValue="GBP" allowAnonymous="true"/>

  <add name="ShoppingCart" provider="AspNetProvider" serializeAs="Binary" type="espa.core.business.ESPAShoppingCart" allowAnonymous="true"/>

  </properties>

  </profile>

  
  This seems to work fine for me.  All the non-anonymous properites are stored in the sitefinity tables, and the anonymous properties are stored in the ASP.NET tables. 
  
  Farhan

  Reply

• Adam

  Posted on Jul 1, 2008 (permalink)

  Farhan,
  
  Thanks for the workaround, but we wont be able to use both asp.net and sitefinity membership tables.  Session will work for the time being, but I hope telerik fixes this issue in the near future.
  
  Regards,
  Adam
  

  Reply

• Vlad Vlad

  Posted on Jul 2, 2008 (permalink)

  Hi Adam and Farhan,
  
  Yes, this issue is in our Bug Tracking system.
  We will do our best to fix it in the next release.
  
  Best wishes,
  Vlad
  the Telerik team

  
  Instantly find answers to your questions at the new Telerik Support Center

  Reply

• Mike

  Posted on Jan 8, 2009 (permalink)

  Was this issue ever addressed?  I believe I'm experiencing the same thing in SF 3.5. 
  
  Regards,
  Mike

  Reply

• Mike

  Posted on Jan 9, 2009 (permalink)

  Just as a followup, I set up a second provider to handle profile information the way Farhan described (THANKS!!) and I stopped getting the invalidCastException on the calls to retrieve profile properties, and now when I inspect the profile table in AspNetDb database, I can see profile information being written to the profile table. 

  Is there a timetable when this might be addressed?  It's obviously not critical, as there seems to be a good workaround, but it would be nice not to need two separate databases.

  Regards,

  Mike Sharp

  Reply

• Georgi Georgi

  Posted on Jan 14, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi Mike,
  
  There is no time frame for this issue yet. We will follow up if there is some other decision, or a better solution.
  
  Best wishes,
  Georgi
  the Telerik team

  
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  Reply

• Brian

  Posted on Aug 6, 2009 (permalink)

  bump.

  
  

  was this fixed? still waiting.

  Reply

• Georgi Georgi

  Posted on Aug 11, 2009 (permalink)

  Hello Brian,
  
  

  This should be working now. Instead of reading the properties by Profile.MyValue, use Profile.GetPropertyValue("MyValue").
  
  Sincerely yours,
  Georgi
  the Telerik team

  
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• Jaime Weise Intermediate

  Posted on Oct 27, 2009 (permalink)

  This doesn't work for me. I don't need to handle anonymous profiles. I need to store custom objects for authenticated users. These custom types that I need to access can't reside in a different providers since there are no users or roles stored in that datastore.
  
  

  <add name="CurrentRole" type="Vetc.Profiles.Role" />

   

  
  If I set this in the Sitefinity provider it will do fine and serialize the content but as soon as it is updated in the database and it needs to come down again it says that it can't cast type string to Vetc.Profiles.Role(a simple serializable type).
  
  I could just create a group and use all the properties which makes sense for now since the object is just a proxy for the real type which is the generated LINQ to sql type but there should be alternatives for more complex types that need to integrate or be tied to the sitefinity TelerikProfileRole type Maybe I can just switch over to a sql provider for all my needs.
  
  Theoretically that will work without affecting the architecture. Could you give me the Yay or Nay on that scenario? Are there any dependencies in sitefinity that may change or break the functionailty in sitefinity when changing the provider type barring saving the info in different tables?
  
  Thanks, Jaime
  

  Reply

• Radoslav Georgiev Radoslav Georgiev

  Posted on Oct 30, 2009 (permalink)

  Hi jaime,
  
  Thank you for getting back to us.
  
  If you have already working membership, roles and profile providers developed and you have them populated with user you can try to add those providers to Sitefinity. Sitefinity does support the use of security providers other than the built in one (in this case an SQL provider too). Please take a look at the following article for more information: Implementing Multiple Membership Providers. Please note that the front end of sitefinity allows you to use more than one provider at the same time. However the back end can work with only one default provider and can not authenticate and authorize users from multiple providers.
  
  If this approach does not work for you, you will have to go on with the one that you have suggested - to provide profile groups and just put in relevant fields.
  
  Greetings,
  Radoslav Georgiev
  the Telerik team

  
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  Reply

• Jaime Weise Intermediate

  Posted on Mar 12, 2010 (permalink)

  Hi there,

  
  

  This just in

  By Adding the correct config sections and assembly references and registrations I was able to work with the Telerik Role provider from a regular website enabling me to share user and role data with the standard Sitefinity install. The whole reason for this was I wanted a light-weight way to develop role-based controls but share the same data . This way I don't have to compile everything for tests.

  
  

  Jaime

  Reply

• John White

  Posted on Jun 26, 2010 (permalink)

  This is EXACTLY what I am trying to do and cannot find anything concrete.
  
  By Adding the correct config sections and assembly references and registrations I was able to work with the Telerik Role provider from a regular website enabling me to share user and role data with the standard Sitefinity install. The whole reason for this was I wanted a light-weight way to develop role-based controls but share the same data.
  
  Which config sections and which assembly references/registrations?

  Reply

• Ivan Dimitrov Ivan Dimitrov

  Posted on Jun 27, 2010 (permalink)

  Hello John White,
  
  The sections for the role, membership and profile provider are declared in the web.config file that resides in the root of the website
  
  Sections
  
  <roleManager>
  <membership>
  <profile>
  
  References to the standard ASP.NET providers
  
  System.Web
  System.Web.Security
  
  Under <securiry> node you can define the default membership provider that the backend will use
  
  

  <security defaultProvider="DefaultSecurityProvider" cmsProvidersName="CustomProvider">

  
  
  All the best,
  Ivan Dimitrov
  the Telerik team

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