Custom Profile Provider

[Weston Weems]

Ok, when I first started to play with the Provider model for all things
membership in ASP.NET 2.0, I have to say I was pleased... but I must
have missed something here...

I've got two questions...

1) I'd like to have profile be a strongly typed complex object derived
from profilebase. I've edited in web.config to change <provider name=""
inherits="MyNamespace.CustomProfile">.

I would like to simply construct this object with my homebrew OR Mapper,
which I beleive I can get the context (a user id, or a username)

But the only way I can return data from the ProfileProvider is through a
collection of name/value pairs? That seems extremely lame.

Should I just scrap the profiles all together and somehow assign
equivalent of a profile on Authentication?
any one have any advice that way? It looks like it was designed to be
able to use custom strongly typed complex objects, I just don't know how
to populate the object.

2) How does one DEBUG a custom profile provider extension? I build both
the parent web project in debug mode, as well as the custom provider as
well. When I set a breakpoint and hit start, it'll always say either "No
symbols loaded for this document" or "There is no executable code at
this line numbers"

I want it to break in Initialize() method, when should I expect it to
break (application start is what I would have guessed)




Please any input would be greatly appreciated.
Weston

 

[Dominick Baier]

If you derive from ProfileBase and set the inherits in web.config you can
access the values just using your properties...what's the problem?

 

[Weston Weems]

That side of things is no problem. When I do that, I actually appear to
be getting out what I expect to when I try Profile.SomeCustomCollection...

Its the population of that object with real information from my data
provider.

Everything wants to be in a namevalue collection. I am curious as to why
they didnt allow you to return a Profile, eg, they feed you a customer
id, or custoer name, and expect you to return a Profile object.

Instead they cripple the provider interface and dont let you get that
low yourself. The problem is that I want to use my OR mapper to quickly
load up a CustomProfile object from db, and pass that object back.

Profile.GetType() already returns CustomProfile, its just empty.

Weston