DnnUserProfile Data Source

Warning ⚠️: New Docs Available

These are old docs and we haven't found the time to completely move them. You will find comprehensive new docs on docs.2sxc.org.

Now you can easily query all or some user profiles to show in user directories or show extracts of users for any kind of use case. Highly cachable :)

Common Use Cases

1. user profile pages
2. web-based member directories
3. javascript based (recommended) member directories
4. hidden report-pages to show users according to certain criteria

Example

This image shows a visual query in a real javascript based user directory:

The Settings

1. Title field - this is the field from the profile, which should be the title. This is important because each content-item must have a title. By default it's the DisplayName.
2. Properties - these are the properties we want to use in our query. Other properties are not passed on
3. Content-Type-Name - this is not really important, but there are cases where you want to name your content-type.
4. UserIDs - you could filter by user-id to only retrieve one or more users, like "52560,3050". This is mostly useful when you want to provide a list with all users, and sometimes run a query to get more details on a use based on a url-param.

Performance and Caching

The DNN User Profile API is very, very slow. For each user retrieved it will hit the database, so retrieving the profile of 3'000 users took about 4-5 seconds in our scenario. This is not acceptable, so we recommend that you add a cache data-source to your query as needed.

Security Considerations

The security impact is very low, as you choose which fields are delivered in the profile. In addition, no password-field is provided, even if you do try to access it. But as a developer you must remember that there may be confidential information or something, just keep your brains on as you work with people-data. 

Fields on a User Profile

This is just for the techies: DNN has grown a bit over time, so it has different places where data is stored. The following fields are technically from the user-object, and stored in own tables in DNN:

1. DisplayName
2. Email
3. FirstName
4. LastName
5. Username

All other properties come from the configurable properties on each portal, so these are a bit like the EAV data model in 2sxc.