Beginning ASP.NET 4.5 in CSharp and VB Opsylum

Understanding Profile x 645
In the following section, you see how to define profile properties in Web.config and how to access
them in your web pages.
NOTE It’s important to realize that the built-in Profile feature works only with
Web Site Projects and not with Web Application Projects. For a discussion on
the difference between the two, refer to Chapter 2. If you fi nd that none of the
examples in this chapter seem to work, check that you haven’t accidentally created
a Web Application Project. The simplest way to check is to look at the Code
Behind file of a Web Form. If you see two Code Behind fi les (one named after the
page with a .cs or .vb extension and one with an additional Designer extension),
you have created a Web Application Project. In that case, get yourself
a copy of the Chapter 16 folder that is part of the source that comes with this
book and use that as the starting point for this chapter.
Configuring the Profile
You define a profile for your website in the Web.config file by creating a element as
a direct child of the element. Between the tags, you need to create a
element that is used to define the properties you want to expose from your Profile
object. Two types of properties exist: simple properties and complex properties, referred to as profile
groups.
Creating Simple Profile Properties
You define simple properties as direct children of the element using an element.
The following example demonstrates how to create a property that can be used to hold a
user’s first name and one to hold a date of birth. The FirstName property can be accessed and set
for authenticated and anonymous users, whereas the DateOfBirth property is accessible only to
logged-in users:
...
Because properties are by default of type System.String, there’s no need to define an explicit
type on the property for text-based properties like a first name. However, for other types like
a DateTime, a Boolean, an Integer, or your own types, you need to define the type explicitly
using the type attribute and its fully qualified name including its namespace, as shown for the
DateOfBirth property. The following table lists the most common attributes of the element
that influence the properties of a profile.